Page:The Hunterian Oration for 1850.djvu/40

 each department of the profession, rendering some form of preliminary education in these branches of study, compulsory on those, destined to become members of our body, the entire removal of all the other causes combined, will fail to extricate it from the degenerate position it now occupies.

I cannot persuade myself to pass without comment, the still prevalent system of, so called, education, by means of apprenticeship, which appears little more or less than an ingenious device by which to exhaust or render nugatory, four or more invaluable years of the early life of the student.

Yet there are few pursuits without their advantages. During these four or more years the so-called student is compelled to practise the art of manipulation, which consists in the wielding the important instruments placed at his command; while he holds converse with the languages of the philosophers and orators of the past world, in a refined latinity obtained from his master’s day-book; and amidst the varied occupations of each eventful day, happily some small portion is allowed him for that most profound study,—the study of himself.

To this disgraceful system of officinal drudgery the medical profession has lent itself, in direct contravention of the laws of moral right, of reason, and of common sense; and glancing for a moment at the necessities of the future practitioner, I ask you, whether the rooted injury thus perpetrated by four or more long years of personal servitude, at this most critical period of a student’s life, in which the only distinction discoverable between his lot and that of an ordinary servant, consists in the fact, that he is made the purchaser of his own degradation, does not inflict a wrong on the mind and habits of a