Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/71

Rh from both; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that Northwest passage of mere speculation, in which so many brave souls have been hopelessly frozen up.

But, whether I am right or wrong about all this, the patent fact of the limitation of time remains. As the song runs:

he might do a number of things not practicable under present conditions. Methuselah might, with much propriety, have taken half a century to get his doctor's degree; and might, very fairly, have been required to pass a practical examination upon the contents of the British Museum, before commencing practice as a promising young fellow of two hundred, or thereabouts. But you have four years to do your work in, and are turned loose, to save or slay, at two or three and twenty.

Now, I put it to you, whether you think that, when you come down to the realities of life—when you stand by the sick-bed, racking your brains for the principles which shall furnish you with the means of interpreting symptoms, and forming a rational theory of the condition of your patient—it will be satisfactory for you to find that those principles are not there, but that, to use the examination slang which is unfortunately too familiar to me, you can quite easily "give an account of the leading peculiarities of the Marsupialia" or "enumerate the chief characters of the Compositæ," or "state the class and order of the animal from which castoreum is obtained."

I really do not think that state of things will be satisfactory to you; I am very sure it will not be so to your patient. Indeed, I am so narrow-minded myself, that if I had to choose between two physicians—one who did not know whether a whale was a fish or not, and could not tell gentian from ginger, but did understand the applications of the institutes of medicine to his art; while the other, like Talleyrand's doctor, "knew every thing, even a little physic"—with all my love for breadth of culture, I should assuredly consult the former.

It is not pleasant to incur the suspicion of an inclination to injure or depreciate particular branches of knowledge. But the fact, that one of those which I should have no hesitation in excluding from the medical curriculum is that to which my own life has been specially devoted, should, at any rate, defend me from the suspicion of being urged to this course by any but the very gravest considerations of the public welfare.

And I should like, further, to call your attention to the important circumstance that, in thus proposing the exclusion of the study of such branches of knowledge as zoology and botany, from those