Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/312

308 some ranking with the best in the world, others periodically raided by the police.

Our democratic custom is to let every school shift for itself. In the eyes of the law, every doctor is a doctor, if he has earned or bought a diploma somewhere—herb-doctor, corn-doctor, faith-healer, electric-healer, all kinds of healers, pass as doctors, and the people must choose for themselves.

Doubtless science wins in the long run. The honest school and the honest man are the final winners, but there is a prodigious amount of waste and suffering before the public knows the difference between surgeons and bloodsuckers.

More and more the honest medical schools are brought into touch with the university. Around the university the tested educational machinery tends to center. Sound instruction in medicine demands a broad base of science—physiology, anatomy, chemistry, histology, bacteriology and above all the methods of scientific research. All these are fundamental to any real knowledge of the art of medicine. All these are essentials in the work of the modern university. The medical school is giving these up to the institutions which can teach them for their own sake, and therefore teach them better. This change shortens the medical course, by making it longer, by placing it on a broader and higher foundation. The medical school, then, teaches the application of science, the science itself being studied elsewhere. There is a tendency toward an easy transition from the one to the other, so that the student can not tell when he began to study medicine.

In the old days the transition was abrupt, and the medical student learned applications of science before he had the faintest idea of science itself. He was thrown at once into a topsy-turvy world, where decencies did not count, where grewsome honors were everyday affairs, and where all ordinary restraints were cast aside. Hence he kept his tobacco in the skull of a murderer, wore a resurrection bone for a scarf-pin, and was the most reckless, lawless, irreverent of all students, careless of temperance, sanitation and chastity. Of all students, thirty years ago, the medical student had deservedly the reputation of being the worst.

Leaving out ill-equipped or temporary schools, the American medical school of the future will have one or the other of two great purposes. The one is typified perhaps by the Medical School of Michigan. It will take the profession as it is and raise it as a whole. So many men will be doctors, so many will be lawyers in Michigan. Let us take them as we find them and make them just as good lawyers and doctors as we can. Let us not drive them away by requirements they can not or will not meet, but adjust the work and conditions to the