Page:Stewart 1879 On the teaching of medicine in Edinburgh University.djvu/10

8 unaided observation, or from the reading of the clerk; the Professor, probably, discovered that his teaching was correspondingly improved, for practical interest in cases always greatly facilitates the acquisition of theoretical knowledge; while the Managers of the Infirmary found their Institution made more popular and their pecuniary resources augmented, by the increased number of students which the lectures attracted.

The Professor of Practice of Physic was not long left to conduct the clinical course alone. Soon a number of his colleagues in the University were associated with him in the arduous work, for I find that in the year 1756 three other Professors co-operated with him in the course of the five months' session, each taking duty for five weeks. During the first part of the session there was the Professor of Anatomy, Dr. Alexander Monro; the second, the Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, Dr. Whytt; the third, the Professor of Practice of Physic, Dr. Rutherford; and the fourth, the celebrated Dr. Cullen, who afterwards adorned the Chair of Physic. It was an immense advantage, and one which, I hope, may always be retained in Edinburgh, that the students thus obtained the opportunity of seeing the practice, not of one professor, but of three or four.

But ideas as to clinical teaching gradually advanced. Mere ex cathedra statements by professors, however experienced, no longer sufficed; and the system which had been considered so nearly perfect in the middle of the last century was rather lightly esteemed in the beginning of this. In this we have an instance of a great rule which one may constantly observe in operation in different spheres of life—that the great step in advance of to-day becomes a matter of course to-morrow, and at last is displaced by some new suggestion. Dr. Graves, of Dublin, complained that, when he studied here in 1819, the clinical teaching was most defective, and he says that he feared that many were annually dubbed doctors at Edinburgh who had scarcely ever been called upon to write a prescription. But such an assertion could not have been justly made thirty years later, when, under the leading of Professor Hughes Bennett and others, the present practical system had been developed.

At the present time, medicine is taught in the University by means of systematic and clinical courses. Let me explain to you