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students the impression that they, and not the professor, had worked out the problem to a successful result.

This system, if such it may be termed, proved extremely successful, and the knowledge of this success spread rapidly from one end of Europe to the other, causing students and physicians to flock to Leyden from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy and England. So long as this particular university continued to possess, as a member of its faculty, a professor of medicine who was clever enough to carry on clinical instruction with the same profound knowledge of human nature as had been displayed by Sylvius, just so long did this institution remain without a rival in this part of the field of medical education. Then Sylvius was followed, in the work of clinical teaching, by Boerhaave, a man admirably fitted, both by nature and by the training which he had received, to keep the University of Leyden in the first rank of medical schools as regards this most useful form of discipline. After 1738, the year in which Boerhaave died, other universities besides that of Leyden began to provide fairly satisfactory facilities for clinical study, and among the number of such institutions those of Utrecht, Rome, Edinburgh, Paris and Halle deserve to be mentioned. The lack of funds and doubtless also the lack of the right sort of teachers were the principal reasons why these schools were not able to vie with Leyden in furnishing the facilities needed for clinical instruction. That the fault—at least in the case of the University of Halle—was not to be attributed to a failure on the part of the Medical Faculty to appreciate the value of such instruction is clearly shown by the saying attributed to Friedrich Hoffmann, who at that period was the Professor of Medicine:—

By a mere attendance upon medical lectures no man will ever succeed in becoming a properly equipped practitioner of that art; it is indispensable, in addition, that he should receive clinical instruction.

The fairly permanent establishment of this fundamental branch of medical teaching was not effected until about the