more than twelve hundred bodies during the continuance of his connection with that institution. So far as I have been able to learn from my examination of the literature, the professors and their immediate official assistants were the only persons who had, up to this time, derived the principal benefits that flow from work of this nature; the students merely listened to the instructor's remarks upon the objects which had previously been exposed to view by dissection. But toward the end of the period—a little before or shortly after the beginning of the eighteenth century—facilities were provided in some of the medical schools, and before long in all of the leading ones, for the students themselves to participate in this highly important part of a physician's education. The value of such training was emphasized by the statement made by the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704), toward the end of his life, viz., that all human understanding is based upon experience. He wrote that at birth the human soul is like a clean sheet of paper upon which all the objects perceived by the senses are recorded as experiences, and there they remain until by the aid of reflexion—i.e., by the aid of the understanding, which Locke calls the inner sense—they are combined into conceptions or ideas. Locke, it should be remembered, was educated as a physician, but he never took his degree, nor did he ever practice medicine.
The first stimulating effects of the Renaissance upon the devotees of the science of medicine were felt in Italy toward the end of the fifteenth century, and these effects rapidly gained in intensity during the following century. First France and afterward Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and England were almost simultaneously brought under the same influence; and in all these countries the students manifested a remarkable eagerness to acquire all the knowledge they possibly could. In Germany, however, the influence of the Renaissance did not make itself felt until a much later date, and the thirst for knowledge was very much slower in developing than was the case in any of the other countries mentioned. Thus Puschmann, in his "History of Medical Education," makes the following
