Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/402

370 undergraduate study, so largely expanded, but also in recently developed disciplines.

The clear appreciation of the close relationship of medicine to other phases of biology; the newly recognized importance of practical familiarity with things themselves, rather than with the impressions which another has gathered and more or less lucidly imparts; the patient training of the hand and eye and ear to catch minutest variations in surface and color and shape and sound—all these requirements of modern medical instruction involve pecuniary support far beyond that which was formerly sufficient.

As was to be expected, the necessity for improvement in the medical curriculum and the urgency of the requirements of research have been recognized at this university in the revision and expansion of its medical course. And it is to be hoped that the appeal for endowment of the medical school here at Yale, made in the President's last report, may not go unheeded by those who are now for a little while the custodians of wealth, and in whose power it is to bring into play facilities for instruction and capacities for research so full in the promise of immediate practical utility.

What, now, is the attitude of the physician, in the light of the broader and more exact science which is to-day at his disposal? It may be at once conceded that his physical presence has mainly lost its old-time picturesqueness.

It is inevitable that as soon as he laid aside the mysteries and fictions and superstitions with which erstwhile he was wont to invest his calling, was obliged to abandon charms and auguries and secret remedies, and could no longer safely summon to his aid the occult forces with which outgrown fantasies invested plant and mineral and pregnant aspects of the stars, and was forced to confess that in dealing with his charges he was even, as other devotees to other sciences are, simply a student of common things with the simple resources of actual knowledge and common sense it was under these conditions, I say, inevitable that his claims to confidence must more definitely rest upon his sound learning, his obvious skill, his actual experience.

A large part of the late surviving professional mannerism and dictatorial assumption has also passed away, and the doctor of to-day is a man of the world, the friend as well as the expert.

It is a very wide-eyed generation which is coming on the scene, and not prone to invest with unnecessary ceremonial or mystery the dealings of its professional advisers with its ailments. Many laymen know as well as we do that the administration of drugs in their hour of stress is but an adjunct to the often more needful and more potent guidance in diet, in regimen, and in the varied