A young man commencing the study of medicine is at once required to endeavour to make an acquaintance with a number of sciences, such as Physics, as Chemistry, as Botany, as Physiology, which are absolutely and entirely strange to him, however excellent his so-called education at school may have been.  Not only is he devoid of all apprehension of scientific conceptions, not only does he fail to attach any meaning to the words “matter,” “force,” or “law” in their scientific senses, but, worse still, he has no notion of what it is to come into contact with nature, or to lay his mind alongside of a physical fact, and try to conquer it, in the way our great naval hero told his captains to master their enemies.  His whole mind has been given to books, and I am hardly exaggerating if I say that they are more real to him than Nature.  He imagines that all knowledge can be got out of books, and rests upon the authority of some master or other; nor does he entertain any misgiving that the method of learning which led to proficiency in the rules of grammar, will suffice to lead him to a mastery of the laws of Nature.  The youngster, thus unprepared for serious study, is turned loose among his medical studies, with the result, in nine cases out of ten, that the first year of his curriculum is spent in learning how to learn.  Indeed, he is lucky, if at the end of the first year, by the exertions of his teachers and his own industry, he has acquired even that art of arts.  After which there remain not more than three, or perhaps four, years for the profitable study of such vast sciences as Anatomy, Physiology, Therapeutics, Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, and the like, upon his knowledge or ignorance of which it depends whether the practitioner shall diminish, or increase, the bills of mortality.  Now what is it but the preposterous condition of ordinary school education which prevents a young man of seventeen, destined for the practice of medicine, from being fully prepared for the study of nature; and from coming to the medical school, equipped with that preliminary knowledge of the principles of Physics, of Chemistry, and of Biology, upon which he has now to waste one of the precious years, every moment of which ought to be given to those studies which bear directly upon the knowledge of his profession?

There is another profession, to the members of which, I think, a certain preliminary knowledge of physical science might be quite as valuable as to the medical man.  The practitioner of medicine sets before himself the noble object of taking care of man’s bodily welfare; but the members of this other profession undertake to “minister to minds diseased,” and, so far as may be, to diminish sin and soften sorrow.  Like the medical profession, the clerical, of which I now speak, rests its power to heal upon its knowledge of the order of the universe—­upon certain theories of man’s relation to that which lies outside him.  It is not my business to express