Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th 1887 (IA b30475958).pdf/28

 fore last. There is indeed a small but scanty manual by Dr. McGregor Robertson, the Muirhead Demonstrator of Physiology in the University of Glasgow, published in Cassell’s Student’s Series, but it is entirely unfit to compete with the two exhaustive treatises named before.

As with the bibliography, so with the teaching. With the exception of a course of lectures which the present speaker has delivered since 1871 in St. Thomas’s Hospital, I am not aware of any systematic attempt in London to teach the medical student the vast mass of physical facts which underlie the daily practice of medicine. This College, however, forms an honourable exception, for it has on two occasions kindly given me the opportunity to bring before my brother physicians some few of what our Harvey terms “ Nova vel Novita inventa,”—respecting the Physical Basis of Auscultation in the Croonian, and the Electrical Conditions of the Human Body in the Lumleian, lectures of a few years back.

It is true that the University of London in its Preliminary Scientific Examination for the