Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/679

Rh and a little more play would be desirable, and that there need be no cause for surprise to find that many of the scholars suffer from headaches, anæmia, arrested development, and various manifestations of exhausted nerve-force.

Then there are the school examinations, and these, I am satisfied, require great care, while most useful means of rendering the knowledge acquired by the pupils definite. A former pupil in the sixth form writes: "With regard to examinations, an hour's examination in each subject was supposed to take place once a month. At the end of the term we had from a week to a fortnight's examination in all subjects prepared during the term. Making fellows learn up all their repetition at end of term, and keeping them back if they fail to say it, I consider a piece of barbarism." I believe that in many schools the examinations at the end of the term embrace so many subjects, and lead to so much cramming of minute details, that from these causes and the spirit of emulation excited the brain is often unduly stimulated, and a state of commotion induced which is highly undesirable. It is true that a long holiday then comes to the scholar's relief, but even an extremely long holiday does not render it safe to undergo extremely severe mental strain. I suspect that with some it is thought to do so, but it is most important that this error should be clearly pointed out. A schoolmaster recently remarked to me that a boy would sometimes answer the first paper in the examination very well the next not so well, and by the time he was engaged in the last questions he would be muddled and stupid. "He seemed to have got to the end of his brain," as the master aptly expressed it.

I wish now to refer to the present system of medical education. How can it be otherwise than injurious when we consider that during recent years the amount of knowledge which it is necessary to master has prodigiously increased in every department, while the length of time in which to acquire it remains the same?

In regard to some examinations, a tremendous burden is laid upon the memory. There is a long period of strain, the climax of which is reached when the period of examination arrives, during which the student's mind has to hold in solution the details of knowledge on many subjects. It is often a solution saturated with minute facts and figures, many of which are of no permanent use, and indeed can not be remembered any longer. The mind is cramped and narrowed by this mischievous cramming, as must necessarily happen when the issue of an examination is made largely to hang upon a retentive memory.

While no one proposes to go back to the old system of medical education, it may well be doubted whether the character of these examinations is calculated to develop the best practitioners or physicians, loading the memory, as they too often do, at the expense of breadth, depth, and originality. The lectures delivered in the medical