Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/70

60 medical curriculum should be, for I find that views, more or less closely approximating these, are held by all who have seriously considered the very grave and pressing question of medical reform; and have, indeed, been carried into practice, to some extent, by the most enlightened examining boards. I have heard but two kinds of objections to them. There is, first, the objection of vested interests, which I will not deal with here, because I want to make myself as pleasant as I can, and no discussions are so unpleasant as those which turn on such points. And there is, secondly, the much more respectable objection, which takes the general form of the reproach that, in thus limiting the curriculum, we are seeking to narrow it. We are told that the medical man ought to be a person of good education and general information, if his profession is to hold its own among other professions; that he ought to know botany, or else, if he goes abroad, he won't be able to tell poisonous fruits from edible ones; that he ought to know drugs, as a druggist knows them, or he won't be able to tell sham bark and senna from the real articles; that he ought to know zoology, because—well, I really have never been able to learn exactly why he is to be expected to know zoology. There is, indeed, a popular superstition, that doctors know all about things that are queer or nasty to the general mind, and may, therefore, be reasonably expected to know the "barbarous binomials" applicable to snakes, snails, and slugs; an amount of information with which the general mind is usually completely satisfied. And there is a scientific superstition that physiology is largely aided by comparative anatomy—a superstition which, like most, once had a grain of truth at bottom; but the grain has become homœopathic, since physiology took its modern experimental development, and became what it is now—the application of the principles of physics and chemistry to the elucidation of the phenomena of life.

I hold as strongly as any one can do, that the medical practitioner ought to be a person of education and good general culture; but I also hold by the old theory of a faculty, that a man should have his general culture before he devotes himself to the special studies of that faculty; and I venture to maintain that, if the general culture obtained in the faculty of arts were what it ought to be, the student would have quite as much knowledge of the fundamental principles of physics, of chemistry, and of biology, as he needs, before he commenced his special medical studies.

Moreover, I would urge that a thorough study of human physiology is, in itself, an education broader and more comprehensive than much that passes under that name. There is no side of the intellect which it does not call into play, no region of human knowledge into which either its roots, or its branches, do not extend; like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow