Last March there graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania one of these self-supporting young men.  He was the son of a missionary clergyman:  the father was poor in pocket, but the son was not poor in spirit.  During the interval between his winter courses of lectures, rather than be a burden to his father, rather than accept gratuitous instruction from the school, he went into the coal regions of Pennsylvania and worked in a coal-mine, as a common miner, to procure funds to enable him to complete his professional studies; and, strange as it may seem, this young miner passed an excellent examination, and received the unanimous vote of the medical faculty for his degree.  I mention this case, but every year there are several similar; and we always find that the school-teachers and miners are by no means at the foot of the graduating class.

Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following statement:  “The clinical teaching in an American hospital is comprised in the following routine:  Once or twice a week, from one to five hundred men being congregated in an amphitheatre, the professor lectures upon a case brought into the arena, perhaps operates, and when the hour has expired the class is dismissed.  Evidently, under such circumstances there cannot be the training of the senses, the acquiring of a knowledge of the hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity with the proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such vital importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact with patients.”  What can the writer of this sentence mean?  Certainly, no one knows better than he does that such is not the practice in the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in many other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services are held for several hours daily throughout the year, and where the student has furnished him abundant opportunities four “acquiring a knowledge of the ... symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and wounded,” etc. etc.  That the American medical student profits by these opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved by the unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which occurs toward the close of the article, where Dr. Wood says, “The great resources of the medical profession in America were proved during the civil war, when there was created in a few months a service which for magnitude and efficiency has rarefy if ever been equaled.  Indeed, military medicine was raised by it to a point never reached before that time in Europe, and the results achieved have in many points worked a revolution in science.”  The italics in this quotation are mine, as they also are in those which follow.