But (says the article under review) “the largest proportion of our prominent physicians have educated themselves after graduation.”  As if this were an extraordinary or unusual circumstance!  Certainly, they have; and so have all prominent men in all professions and all pursuits of life, in every age and every country, not even excepting the much-lauded men of Great Britain and the continent of Europe.  What young lawyer is entrusted with an important cause immediately after admission to the Bar?  And as the young doctor (according to the aforesaid showing) “gains his first practical knowledge while serving as a hospital resident, under the supervision of experienced men,” so the young lawyer, even in Great Britain, must gain his first practical knowledge by constant attention at the courts, and by diligently following the proceedings of his preceptor’s and other offices.  Even the young clergyman, whose business it is to save souls, has to do very much as the young doctor does, and, like him, is often “thrown at once on his own resources, gaining his experience without supervision, and at the expense of the poorer classes, who naturally fall to his charge, and whose ignorance precludes them from an even approximately correct estimate of” his fitness.  “It is one of the saddest features of our system that the famed skill of our best” (clergymen) “should so often be acquired at such a cost.”

What can be more unphilosophical and illogical than to compare the young doctor, or any other young professional man, to a new piece of machinery, fresh from the manufactory, complete and perfect in all its parts?  And yet something like this is attempted in the article before us.  Even as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jove the complete and perfect goddess of learning, so would our Utopian writer have the young doctors to come from the brains of their medical professors complete and perfect; only, if his idea be correct, their medical professors have so little brains that the annual graduating medical classes of the United States would be immediately reduced from the frightful army of three thousand “legalized murderers” to the comparatively small and easily counted number of one graduate (of course, springing from one head).  No; the young doctor, at graduation, cannot be compared to a new, complete and perfect machine fresh from the manufactory; rather, let him be compared to the young marsupial creature at birth, extremely rudimentary, whose natural, and hence fittest, place is the parental pouch, but which in due time becomes the vigorous and well-developed specimen.  I suppose, if I compare the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that his protecting parental pouch, in which he acquires growth and vigor, is the hospital where he goes after graduation, or the practice which he sees under his preceptor’s supervision.