Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/92

88 medicine, is not too much to exact of a student who aspires to be a physician worthy of our times and of the degree of our universities. First hand knowledge of real things should be the key-note of all scientific instruction. "Far more effort is now made," writes a correspondent, "in both the preparatory and the clinical branches to give the student a first hand knowledge of the subject. This tendency has still a long way to travel before it is in danger of being overdone. The practical result of this tendency is that the cost of education per student is greatly increased and the profits of purely commercial schools are thereby threatened. This forms, doubtless, the main source of the objection made by the weaker and less worthy schools to better methods of instruction. We need well endowed schools of medicine that may carry on their work unhampered by the necessities of a commercial venture. Medical schools now exist in great numbers, many of them can not keep up with modern requirements, and necessarily their salvation lies in antagonizing everything in the nature of more ample and more expensive training."

Another correspondent writes, emphasizing the value of biologic studies: "The final comprehension of bodily activity in health and disease depends on knowledge of living things from ovum to birth, from birth to maturity, and from maturity to old age and death. Anything less than such fundamental knowledge requires constant guessing to fill up the gaps, and guesses are nearly always wrong."

In many regards, even our best schools of medicine seem to show serious deficiencies. The teaching of anatomy is still one of the most costly, as well as least satisfactory, of our lines of work. A correspondent calls attention to the fact that in making anatomy 'practical' in our medical schools 'we expended last year $750,000 in the United States, twice the amount expended in Germany, with as a result neither practical anatomy nor scientific achievement.' "Anatomy," he continues, "should be made distinctly a university department, on a basis similar to that of physics and chemistry. Unfortunately, university presidents still stand much in the way of the development of anatomy, for many of them seem to think that almost any one who wears the gown is good enough to become a professor of anatomy. Repeatedly have I witnessed the appointment of a know-nothing when a recognized young man might have been had for half the money." Our forces are dissipated, the fear of things scientific has destroyed even the practical in this noble old mother science which is still giving birth to new sciences and to brilliant discoveries.

Among other matters too much neglected are personal hygiene, a matter to which the physician of the past has been notoriously and joyously indifferent. Especially is this true as regards the hygiene of exercise and the misuse of nerve-affecting drugs.

Public sanitation as well deserves more attention. "The demand for adequately trained officers of public health is not what it should be,