non-productive, assimilative teacher of wide learning, continuous receptivity, critical sense, and responsive interest. Not infrequently these men, catholic in their sympathies, scholarly in spirit and method, prove the purveyors and distributors through whom new ideas are harmonized and made current. They preserve balance and make connections. The one person for whom there is no place in the medical school, the university, or the college, is precisely he who has hitherto generally usurped the medical field,—the scientifically dead practitioner, whose knowledge has long since come to a standstill and whose lectures, composed when he first took his chair, like pebbles rolling in a brook get smoother and smoother as the stream of time washes over them.
The student is throughout to be kept on his mettle. He does not have to be a passive learner, just because it is too early for him to be an original explorer. He can actively master and securely fix scientific technique and method in the process of acquiring the already known. From time to time a novel turn may indeed give zest to routine; but the undergraduate student of medicine will for the most part acquire the methods, standards, and habits of science by working over territory which has been traversed before, in an atmosphere freshened by the search for truth.
For purposes of convenience, the medical curriculum may be divided into two parts, according as the work is carried on mainly in laboratories or mainly in the hospital; but the distinction is only superficial, for the hospital is itself in the fullest sense a laboratory. In general, the four-year curriculum falls into two fairly equal sections: the first two years are devoted mainly[1] to laboratory sciences,—anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, pathology; the last two to clinical work in medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. The former are concerned with the study of normal and abnormal phenomena as such; the latter are busy with their practical treatment as manifested in disease. How far the earlier years should be at all conscious of the latter is a mooted question. Anatomy and physiology are ultimately biological sciences. Do the professional purposes of the medical school modify the strict biological point of view? Should the teaching of anatomy and physiology be affected by the fact that these subjects are parts of a medical curriculum? Or ought they be presented exactly as they would be presented to students of biology not intending to be physicians? A layman hesitates to offer an opinion where the doctors disagree, but the purely pedagogical standpoint may assist a determination of the issue. Perhaps a certain misconception of what is actually at stake is in a measure responsible for the issue. Scientific rigor and thoroughness are not in question. Whatever the point of view—whether purely biological or medical — scientific method is equally feasible and essential; a verdict favorable to recognition of the explicitly medical standpoint would not derogate from scientific rigor. There is no doubt that the sciences in question can be properly cultivated only in the university in their entirety
- ↑ An introductory course in physical diagnosis is given in the second year; occasionally clinical work is begun in its latter half.
