finger-tips or eloquently describing an organ which no one but the prosector distinctly sees; at the close of which oratorical performance he snatches his hat and, amid mingled applause and cat-calls, makes for his automobile to begin his round of daily visits. In the afternoons "demonstrators" supervise the dissecting, where eight or ten inexpert boys hack away at a cadaver until it is reduced to shreds. The actual emphasis falls on the didactic teaching and the quiz-drills; something like half the student's time is spent in the lecture-room: 220 out of 450 hours at Louisville, 360 out of 684 at the College of Physicians and Surgeons (University of Illinois), Chicago. The really effective work is not infrequently done by quiz-masters, who drill hundreds of students in memorizing minute details which they would be unable to recognize if the objects were before them. This is a flourishing industry in "great medical centers" like Chicago[1] and Philadelphia.
Pathology is practically in the same condition. The best of these schools are well supplied with microscopes, microtomes, and material. But the teaching is usually uninspired routine drill. Sections are cut, stained, mounted, and observed. At the close of the year the student will perhaps have accumulated a box of several dozen slides, which he may carry home with him. But the work has been largely histological,—devoid of experimental features, on the one hand, and but feebly articulated with clinic and autopsy, on the other. The autopsy is indeed the indispensable adjunct of an effective department of pathology. "A course in pathology without autopsy work and fresh material is like a course in systematic botany without field work."[2] The facilities of all but a few of our best schools are in this respect unduly limited; at no other point is the lack of a hospital under school control more acutely felt. Makeshifts of various kinds are invoked by way of remedy: in New York, for example, Columbia and Cornell have attached the two coroner's physicians who serve in the autopsy-room of the great Bellevue Hospital, thus procuring fresh material from a large number of cases. The arrangement still leaves the professor of pathology himself out of account. Of the schools belonging to the class under consideration few have even fair opportunities of this character; some of them rely altogether on a friendly coroner's cursory performance in the rear room of an undertaker's establishment.[3] The classes at the University of Maryland witness "perhaps ten [autopsies] a year;" the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Baltimore, describes its opportunities as "restricted;" Georgetown University (Washington) gets a "few," Hahnemann (Chicago), "four or five a year;" at Northwestern they are "scanty, the students do none;" at Cooper (San Francisco) they are scarce. For the most part, the student has merely made the microscopic rounds of the typical abnormal growths; his fundamental ignorance of biology, which no serious attempt is made to cure comes
