—­But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in the next generation, or in some possible remote future.—­

“Diavolo!” as your Dr. Rabelais has it,—­answers the iconoclast,—­“what is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury?  I pay the Captain of the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to Liverpool, not to make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers!  If Professor Peirce undertakes to pilot me into Boston Harbor and runs me on Cohasset rocks, what answer is it to tell me that he is Superintendent of the Coast Survey?  No, Sir!  I want a plain man in a pea-jacket and a sou’wester, who knows the channel of Boston Harbor, and the rocks of Boston Harbor, and the distinguished Professor is quite of my mind as to the matter, for I took the pains to ask him before I ventured to use his name in the way of illustration.”

I do not know how the remarks of the image-breaker may strike others, but I feel that they put me on my defence with regard to much of my teaching.  Some years ago I ventured to show in an introductory Lecture how very small a proportion of the anatomical facts taught in a regular course, as delivered by myself and others, had any practical bearing whatever on the treatment of disease.  How can I, how can any medical teacher justify himself in teaching anything that is not like to be of practical use to a class of young men who are to hold in their hands the balance in which life and death, ease and anguish, happiness and wretchedness are to be daily weighed?

I hope we are not all wrong.  Oftentimes in finding how sadly ignorant of really essential and vital facts and rules were some of those whom we had been larding with the choicest scraps of science, I have doubted whether the old one-man system of teaching, when the one man was of the right sort, did not turn out better working physicians than our more elaborate method.  The best practitioner I ever knew was mainly shaped to excellence in that way.  I can understand perfectly the regrets of my friend Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, for the good that was lost with the old apprenticeship system.  I understand as well Dr. Latham’s fear “that many men of the best abilities and good education will be deterred from prosecuting physic as a profession, in consequence of the necessity indiscriminately laid upon all for impossible attainments.”

I feel therefore impelled to say a very few words in defence of that system of teaching adopted in our Colleges, by which we wish to supplement and complete the instruction given by private individuals or by what are often called Summer Schools.

The reason why we teach so much that is not practical and in itself useful, is because we find that the easiest way of teaching what is practical and useful.  If we could in any way eliminate all that would help a man to deal successfully with disease, and teach it by itself so that it should be as tenaciously rooted in the memory, as easily summoned when wanted, as fertile in suggestion of related facts, as satisfactory to the peremptory demands of the intelligence as if taught in its scientific connections, I think it would be our duty so to teach the momentous truths of medicine, and to regard all useless additions as an intrusion on the time which should be otherwise occupied.