portion of the usual high school course; besides, it demands greater maturity than the secondary school student can be credited with except towards the close of his high school career. The possibility of mastering the three sciences outside of school may be dismissed without argument. In the college or technical school alone can the work be regularly, efflciently, and surely arranged for. The requirement is therefore necessarily a college requirement, covering two years, because three laboratory courses cannot be carried through in a briefer period,—a fortunate circumstance, since it favors the student's simultaneous development along other and more general lines. It appears, then, that a policy that at the outset was considered from the narrow standpoint of the medical school alone shortly involves the abandonment of this point of view in favor of something more comprehensive. The preliminary requirement for entrance upon medical education must therefore be formulated in terms that establish a distinct relation, pedagogical and chronological, between the medical school and other educational agencies. Nothing will do more to steady and to improve the college itself than its assumption of such definite functions in respect to professional and other forms of special training.
So far we have spoken explicitly of the fundamental sciences only. They furnish, indeed, the essential instrumental basis of medical education. But the instrumental minimum can hardly serve as the permanent professional minimum. It is even instrumentally inadequate. The practitioner deals with facts of two categories. Chemistry, physics, biology enable him to apprehend one set; he needs a different apperceptive and appreciative apparatus to deal with other, more subtle elements. Specific preparation is in this direction much more difficult; one must rely for the requisite insight and sympathy on a varied and enlarging cultural experience. Such enlargement of the physician's horizon is otherwise important, for scientifc progress has greatly modified his ethical responsibility. His relation was formerly to his patientmat most to his patient's family; and it was almost altogether remedial. The patient had something the matter with him; the doctor was called in to cure it. Payment of a fee ended the transaction. But the physician's function is fast becoming social and preventive, rather than individual and curative. Upon him society relies to ascertain, and through measures essentially educational to enforce, the conditions that prevent disease and make positively for physical and moral well-being. It goes without saying that this. type of doctor is first of all an educated man.
How nearly our present resources—educational and economic—permit us to approach the standards above defined is at bottom a question of fact to be investigated presently. We have concluded that a two-year college training, in which the sciences are "featured," is the minimum basis upon which modern medicine can be successfully taught. If the requisite number of physicians cannot at one point or another be procured at that level, a temporary readjustment may be required; but such an expedient is to be regarded as a makeshift that asks of the sick a sacrifce that must not be required of them a moment longer than is necessary. Before accepting such
