“I get every year,” he said, “the elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner—­volumes of I suppose 400 pages altogether—­and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology—­only abstracts of them.  How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world—­in a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour—­if he has to be distracted with the cares of practice?”

There would always be found men, he declared, who would make the choice between the wealth which may come by successful practice and a modest competency, when that modest competency was to be combined with a scientific career and the means of advancing knowledge.  It was to those who made the latter choice that he would entrust the teaching of the sciences underlying medicine; partly because from the mere mechanical reason of time these men would be better able to keep pace with the most recent advances in knowledge, and partly because their teaching would be stimulated by their own work in advancing knowledge.  In this great matter the world is rapidly advancing towards the standard of Huxley; as each new appointment is made it becomes more and more probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and investigator rather than a practitioner.

In another general question of the politics of medical education Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency of change is toward his view.  One of the first results of the awakening of medical education in the middle of this century was a tendency to throw an almost intolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical student.  In the revolt from the old apprenticeship system, in which the student, from the very first, gave his chief attention to practice, and was left almost to himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the principles and theories underlying his profession, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and there was almost no branch of the biological and physical sciences in which he was not expected to go through a severe training.  On the old system the greater part of his time was spent in the wards of the hospital; on the new system it was only at an advanced stage of his career that he entered the wards at all, a great part of his time and energy being spent in the purely scientific teaching of the medical college.  Huxley, although he had largely aided in the overthrow of the happy-go-lucky older system, of which Mr. Bob Sawyer was no exaggerated type, was equally severe on the reckless extensions of the new system.  “If I were a despot,” he said, “I would cut down the theoretical branches to a very considerable extent.”  He would discard comparative anatomy and botany, materia medica, and chemistry and physics, except as applied to physiology, from the medical student’s course.  At first sight, this seems a hard saying, but it is to be remembered that at that time the normal curriculum of a medical