Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/311

Rh ignorance are valued above wisdom. To value wisdom is already to be wise.

The physician of to-day is not a priest nor a sorcerer. His place is rather that of an engineer. One who understands the make-up of the human mind machine, tries to keep it in order and faithfully repairs it when its parts are out of place. He knows that each effect has a cause, none the more mysterious because it must be sought with instruments of precision. He regards pain as a warning, not as a punishment. It is a sign that a screw is loose somewhere, and were it not for this warning we should not be sure to make it good.

In the continental universities of Europe, the teaching of medicine has been from the first a university function. The faculty in medicine has been one of the primary divisions of the university. The teaching of medicine has kept pace with the instruction in law, philosophy and science, under the same general influences, and with the same methods of control. In England, medical instruction has been more or less divorced from the university. It has been rather a function of medical associations and hospitals.

The American college had its origin in English models. Like the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, it was more or less under ecclesiastical control, its first purpose being to develop clergymen and gentlemen, professional training being outside its scope and purpose. Thus the medical school in America arose through associations of physicians, wholly apart from the college system.

But the same argument which justifies common schools, high schools and state universities at public expense, applies to medical schools also. It is cheaper for a state, and infinitely better for it, to educate its own physicians than to tolerate uneducated ones. Better to educate its doctors and hire them afterwards than to be the prey of the quack, the impostor, the nostrum vendor and the almanac. This was the view of the founders of the University of Michigan, the first state college to devote itself frankly to the service of the state, regardless of tradition, regardless of what other states and institutions may be doing.

Other states followed the example of Michigan, establishing schools of law and medicine and of other professions. Still others, as Indiana, adopted a contrary view, and for a time refused to appropriate money to 'help young men into these easy professions.'

Meanwhile, in default of endowment and public support, private interest founded medical schools where they were needed. Later, for purposes of advertising or of money-making, other schools of lower standards were established where they were not needed. Hence we have finally medical schools of every grade of honor and of dishonor,