This, then, is my view of scientific training as conducted in courses such as you are entering on.  Up to a certain point I believe in set Lectures as excellent adjuncts to what is far more important, practical instruction at the bedside, in the operating room, and under the eye of the Demonstrator.  But I am so far from wishing these courses extended, that I think some of them—­suppose I say my own—­would almost bear curtailing.  Do you want me to describe more branches of the sciatic and crural nerves?  I can take Fischer’s plates, and lecturing on that scale fill up my whole course and not finish the nerves alone.  We must stop somewhere, and for my own part I think the scholastic exercises of our colleges have already claimed their full share of the student’s time without our seeking to extend them.

I trust I have vindicated the apparent inconsequence of teaching young students a good deal that seems at first sight profitless, but which helps them to learn and retain what is profitable.  But this is an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp questions asked by and by, and our quick-witted people will perhaps find they can get along as well without the professor’s cap as without the bishop’s mitre and the monarch’s crown.

I myself have nothing to do with clinical teaching.  Yet I do not hesitate to say it is more essential than all the rest put together, so far as the ordinary practice of medicine is concerned; and this is by far the most important thing to be learned, because it deals with so many more lives than any other branch of the profession.  So of personal instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval of lectures, much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory, some in the microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it has many advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not wish to see it shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me long enough already.

If I am jealous of the tendency to expand the time given to the acquisition of curious knowledge, at the expense of the plain old-fashioned bedside teachings, I only share the feeling which Sydenham expressed two hundred years ago, using an image I have already borrowed.  “He would be no honest and successful pilot who was to apply himself with less industry to avoid rocks and sands and bring his vessel safely home, than to search into the causes of the ebbing and flowing of the sea, which, though very well for a philosopher, is foreign to him whose business it is to secure the ship.  So neither will a physician, whose province it is to cure diseases, be able to do so, though he be a person of great genius, who bestows less time on the hidden and intricate method of nature, and adapting his means thereto, than on curious and subtle speculation.”