Page:The History of the University of Pennsylvania, Wood.djvu/117

Rh annual number of graduates has for the last five years varied from ninety-six to one hundred and thirty-one.

The degree of Master of Pharmacy was instituted, a few years since, with the very laudable view of improving the profession of the apothecary, which in this city has assumed an importance far beyond what it possesses in other parts of the United States. Any person is entitled to the degree, who shall have served an apprenticeship of at least three years with a respectable apothecary, and attended two courses of lectures on chemistry and materia medica in the university. Advantages would no doubt have accrued from this accession to the original plan of the medical department, had it not been superseded by the establishment by the apothecaries themselves of a distinct school, which, being under their own management, and directed to the one object of advancing the usefulness and respectability of the profession, is naturally more popular, and at least equally efficient.

Reference has been made, on a previous occasion, to the existence of an anatomical museum, connected with the department of medicine. It is generally known among medical men, that the late Dr. Wistar was indefatigable in collecting together specimens and preparations both in healthy and morbid anatomy, with models and other representations of parts of the human frame, calculated to illustrate his course of anatomical lectures; and they who have had the pleasure of listening to his instruction well remember, how delightfully plain and lucid the most intricate and obscure parts of his subject were rendered by his sedulous efforts to demonstrate to the eye, what could not be well understood from description alone. After his death, his family presented to the