Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/78

74 years of college work, and the student is tempted to regard this as ample preparation. The community meanwhile is seeking not younger but abler physicians. A shorter preparation than that which was obtained by many leading practitioners of the present generation is not likely to make their successors more efficient.

The Value of Scientific Preparation.—There are some physicians who believe that the preparation which has here been recommended produces scientists and not practitioners. It is clear, however, that a single course in physiology, even a very thorough one, does not make a physiologist. The professor of embryology who addressed the students who had just finished his course as "fellow embryologists" was greeted with a roar of laughter. Some of those who know that scientists are not produced by the medical school course still assert that it develops an undesirable type of scientific practitioner. A graduating class has recently been told that "At the bedside science is sometimes a hindrance." Scientific knowledge is often contrasted with common sense and sympathetic humanity, as if they were incompatible and the patient must choose between them. The medicinal effect of a merry heart, known since the time of Solomon, has been rediscovered with great eclat, and the physician whom Holmes described as having a smile "commonly reckoned as being worth five thousand dollars a year to him" has his successors. The character of a physician is unquestionably of great importance, yet medicine is not an art of which "haply we know somewhat more than we know." No condemnation is too severe for a physician who, without adequate knowledge of the medical sciences, attends his patient with self-confidence and a genial smile.

The college student may well be assured that the way to financial and professional success in medicine is through long and careful preparation. In this great pursuit he will not become narrow. He will develop what Dr. James Jackson long ago described as "a mind liberalized by scientific studies," If he loses a certain breadth of culture because of specialization, still, as Cardinal Newman has said, "the advantage of the community is nearly in inverse ratio with his own."