Page:Introductory Address on the General Medical Council, its Powers and its Work.djvu/32

 the Inspector, the Committee, and the Council as to its sufficiency or insufficiency. The whole is discussed in the presence of the public and of the reporters of the various journals, and the decision can thus be criticized with knowledge of its grounds. The net result is certainly beneficial. If a body is commended for some new and valuable feature in its methods, for an examination-experiment which has proved successful, the commendation is public, and the credit of the body is enhanced. The other bodies have the opportunity of learning from the success of the pioneer body, and of adopting the improvements themselves. In this way a virtue is not only praised, it is propagated. It is twice blessed; it blesses the bodies that (thanks to their free initiative) were wise enough to discover or invent it; it blesses also the bodies that offer it the sincere flattery of imitation.

On the other hand, if a clear defect or insufficiency is revealed, the body concerned hears of it, the profession hears of it, the public hears of it. The criticism it calls forth is echoed and re-echoed; and the criticism is not always over-tender or under-pungent. It may in fact be so irksome to self-complacency, so disturbing to conventional dignity, that even a dignified and self-complacent body of men, who are convinced that they are "not as other men," and are persuaded that they "need no repentance," will generally find it expedient to take serious account of it. The forces called into play thus tend to eliminate the defect, or even to convert it into a redundancy of merit, before the next inspection. Please remember that I am not trying to hint at particular examples. I am only, as before, showing how the machinery may be expected to work, and illustrating my thesis that by its intrinsic construction it works for the advancement of professional education and the upward development of the minimum standard.

A few outstanding examples will suffice to make clearer the results which all these factors in co-operation have gradually brought about. The successive judgments of