Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/233

 four years in college and three years in a theological school.

There is, however, another career of service that is nearly, and some believe quite, as holy as the ministry, and that is the service of the profession of medicine.

At that time, entrance to the study of medicine did not require nearly as long a period of formal education as that to enter the Congregational ministry. A good English education—and this Marcus Whitman already had—was deemed sufficient to enter upon the study of medicine. Moreover, at that time the early phase of a medical education did not require going away to an institution with the attendant expense, but could be begun in one's own home town under the local physician, and need not occupy all of one's time, but could be pursued jointly with continuance in a vocation and earning of a livelihood, and accumulation of savings.

And so Marcus Whitman on his twenty-first birthday saw the possibility of satisfying his suppressed but not dead ambition for further study and entrance into a profession of service, a profession no less worthy than that of the ministry, toward which his mind had been directed by the associations of his school days in western Massachusetts.

Under these circumstances, not far from his twenty-first birthday, Marcus Whitman began what we may call his definitive medical education, but who shall deny that the years that had gone before, with their changes of environment, with their association with elders and contemporaries of high ideals and high ambition, were not a part of his medical education. To be sure in them he did not study the technicalities of anatomy, and physiology, and materia medica, but in them he was trained in those high qualities of character which in the practice of medicine are just as essential as technical knowledge.

We must now leave Marcus Whitman as an individual to sketch briefly the system of medical education in vogue in the northeastern United States in 1823 when he entered upon medical study.

During the first hundred and fifty years of the American colonies medical education was entirely by the apprentice system, for there were no medical schools in those colonies until