Page:Stewart 1879 On the teaching of medicine in Edinburgh University.djvu/9

7 the Royal College of Physicians, were admitted within the University as professors. It is recorded in the Council minutes that on the 9th of February, 1726, "the Council being fully convinced that nothing can contribute more to the flourishing of this, or of any other college, than that all the parts of academical learning be professed and taught in them by able professors, they were of opinion that it would be of great advantage to the college, city, and country that medicine in all its branches be taught and professed here by such a number of professors of that science as may by themselves promote students to their degrees with as great solemnity as is done by any other college or university at home or abroad," and they accordingly appoint the four gentlemen I have named, and thus the Medical Faculty of the University became fairly constituted.

In 1728 the first steps were taken for the establishment of the Infirmary. A house was rented, and six beds for the sick poor were established in it. An arrangement was made whereby the apprentices of the surgeons and the students of physic should have the opportunity of observing the practice at the bedside; and when the Infirmary to which we are now bidding farewell was opened, careful arrangements were made to regulate the clinical work. The earliest developments of clinical study must certainly be regarded as very crude. A clerk received a salary for copying into a ledger records of the cases treated in the wards, and he was further entrusted with the duty of reading aloud in the hearing of the students the records that he had made. From this reading your predecessors made their clinical notes. No doubt they also saw much at the bedside; and there is evidence that the readings of the clerk were felt to be of use to the students, for his times of reading were extended; but in the year 1748 a better plan was introduced. Dr. John Rutherford, who was then Professor of Practice of Physic, proposed to establish clinical lectures. His plan of lecturing seems to have been very much like that which is still followed, and its value was instantaneously felt, for the students seem to have perceived that they thus derived a far better conception of the cases under treatment than they did from their own