students the impression that they, and not the professor, had worked out the problem to a successful result.
This system, if such it may be termed, proved extremely
successful, and the knowledge of this success spread
rapidly from one end of Europe to the other, causing
students and physicians to flock to Leyden from Russia,
Poland, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Italy and England. So long as this particular university
continued to possess, as a member of its faculty, a professor
of medicine who was clever enough to carry on
clinical instruction with the same profound knowledge of
human nature as had been displayed by Sylvius, just so
long did this institution remain without a rival in this part
of the field of medical education. Then Sylvius was
followed, in the work of clinical teaching, by Boerhaave,
a man admirably fitted, both by nature and by the training
which he had received, to keep the University of Leyden
in the first rank of medical schools as regards this most
useful form of discipline. After 1738, the year in which
Boerhaave died, other universities besides that of Leyden
began to provide fairly satisfactory facilities for clinical
study, and among the number of such institutions those of
Utrecht, Rome, Edinburgh, Paris and Halle deserve to be
mentioned. The lack of funds and doubtless also the lack
of the right sort of teachers were the principal reasons why
these schools were not able to vie with Leyden in furnishing
the facilities needed for clinical instruction. That the
fault—at least in the case of the University of Halle—was
not to be attributed to a failure on the part of the Medical
Faculty to appreciate the value of such instruction is
clearly shown by the saying attributed to Friedrich Hoffmann,
who at that period was the Professor of Medicine:—
By a mere attendance upon medical lectures no man will ever
succeed in becoming a properly equipped practitioner of that art;
it is indispensable, in addition, that he should receive clinical
instruction.
The fairly permanent establishment of this fundamental
branch of medical teaching was not effected until about the
