Page:Essentials of the Art of Medicine Stille.djvu/12

12 was said of an eminent professor in the University of Oxford that "he had what may be described as the tutorial character, but not the professorial mind." The former of these terms appears to me a suitable description of the teaching which was long in vogue, and is probably extant still in some of our medical schools. It took its rise in the day of small things, but clings tenaciously to some of them still. Until within the last generation not a few professors degraded their teaching to the level of a dame's school by prefacing every lecture with an examination on the previous one. And then the professorial body was not entirely without those anencephalous creatures who year after year rehearsed the same lectures without note, emendation, or addition; who never added anything to the science or art of medicine, but continued rehearsing their parrot cry until the end. Little they recked of the student's thirst for knowledge, and as little seemed conscious that medicine was perpetually changing as a science and as an art. If the professor slumbers the student cannot remain awake, unless it be to resent as dishonest that he should be given a stone instead of the bread that he asked for and paid for. Such a professor was not likely to stimulate the student's mind, to make him think, observe, classify, and analyze his observations; for he was not apt to create in his pupils a craving for what he did not himself possess. His method was distinctly tutorial and not professorial. He alone is a competent professor who can claim at the end of his career that of all his pupils he has been the one most profited by his labors. The greatest men in the ranks of science or literature have been, not the tutors who dealt exclusively in second-hand thoughts, but professors who either originated what was new, or so treated what was not new, as to give it a novel charm and a new efficiency, and while doing so interested their pupils as to make their study a labor of love. From this excursion into the ethical region of my subject I return to the starting point.

It was long ago declared that the art of medicine is founded wholly on the observation of disease. But in all observation there are two factors—the observer and the observed. The thing observed is constant and unchangeable under identical conditions; but observers are perpetually changing and liable to change. So that, although the thing or fact may remain the same the accounts of it given by different observers, or by the same observer under varying conditions, may differ widely from each other, according as the object is seen under different lights, under different angles of vision, in different