Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th 1887 (IA b30475958).pdf/29

 degree of Bachelor of Medicine requires students to satisfy their examiners in physics by means of a written paper. But this paper is the same as that set to Bachelors of Science not medical. It is a terrible stumbling block to the rising medical generation; it bristles with what the late genial Professor De Morgan, himself a mathematician of the highest order, delighted to call mathematical conundrums. It is set by pure physicists, who know nothing, and probably care little, for the problems which interest us as medical men. It contributes a large percentage to the slaughter of innocent aspirants to the higher degrees in medicine, on which one of their most distinguished graduates, now Censor of this College, has feelingly and righteously commented. In the sixteen years during which I have carefully read the papers there set, I have never once seen a question directly or indirectly bearing on the physics of medicine.

The fact is that the large, difficult, and somewhat heterogeneous branch of knowledge connoted by the word physics is rapidly splitting