Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/313

Rh best they can meet, the best standards winning in the long run and carrying public opinion with them.

The other ideal is perhaps typified by Johns Hopkins University. Let the university medical school deal with the exceptional man of exceptional ability and exceptional training. Give him special advantages; send out a limited number of the best physicians possible, and raise the standard of the profession by filling its ranks with the best the university can send.

The one ideal or the other will be, consciously or not, before each professional school which strives to be really helpful. It is not for me to say which is best. The one purpose naturally presents itself to state institutions, or to institutions dependent on appropriations or patronage. The other is more readily achieved by institutions of independent endowment. It is a matter of economy that all schools should not be alike in this respect.

What should be the regular requirement for entrance to the medical school? The university influences tend to push requirements up. The influence of the counting room and the desire to show numbers tend to push them down. Shall men go into medicine from the common school, from the high school; from the middle of the college course; from its end? Or shall we, with Johns Hopkins, demand not only a college course, but one which contains all the sciences fundamental to the study of medicine.

For the second type of schools, the schools which aim at the highest professional success, the latter is the natural requirement, the only one worth considering. For the schools which would elevate the profession as it is, the facts must be met half way. We know that a common school preparation is farcical, yet great physicians have been made with this as the basis of education. Such are men who can learn from their own experience and interpret the experience of others. No matter how wide the door of the colleges, there are some men so strong as to be capable of educating themselves.

The high school course gives a certain breadth of culture. The high school of to-day is as good as the college of forty years ago, so far as studies go. It misses the fact of going away from home and of close relation with men of higher wisdom and riper experience than our high schools demand in their teachers.

It takes a broader mental horizon to be a physician than merely to practise medicine. For those who want the least education possible, they can get along with very little; they can omit the college. But for large-minded, widely competent men, men fit for great duties, not a moment of the college course can be spared. Whether to take a college education or not, depends on the man—what there is in