Abstract
A THOUGHTFUL address on “Medical Education in America,” read by Dr. Bigelow to the Massachusetts Medical Society, has just been published in the form of a pamphlet. It discusses the important subject of the kind and degree of instruction in collateral sciences that should be given to the student of medicine during the short period of four years now at his disposal, and in the course of which he is supposed to have acquired the knowledge that will enable him to practise with advantage, or at least let us say with safety, to his patients, and with credit to himself. The question is of a very complex nature, and its difficulties can, perhaps, only be properly appreciated by those who have themselves been teachers, and who are not, therefore, likely to be led away by Utopian ideas of the amount of information that can be acquired by a man of ordinary abilities in this space of time even under favourable circumstances. It is very easy to say Educate to the highest point possible; let the student know something, at least, of Chemistry, of Botany, of Comparative Anatomy, of the origin, composition, and mode of manufacture of the drugs he uses; but the fact is overlooked that almost all he learns of these subjects is quickly cast aside when he begins to practise, because he finds that it is of no earthly use to him, and he regrets when too late the time he has spent in acquiring them, because it has led him to neglect the far more important matters of Pathological Anatomy, and the actual practice of Medicine and Surgery. “The Medical Student,” Dr. Bigelow observes, “does not need to pick herbs from the field, or treat horses and dogs, or consider his parallelogram of forces before putting in a dislocated shoulder; but he does need to know how to recognise and exactly how to reduce a dislocated shoulder, how to recognise and treat human disease, and what are the medical properties of the drug which the farmer has grown, or the merchant imported for the apothecary. This is but a fair division of labour. He has enough to occupy him profitably and exclusively in his own immediate field of study, without wandering over the whole domain of knowledge—at least, at the mistaken behest of those who have a confused notion of a liberal education and large culture.” “There is a fallacy in the idea of culture. Talent and power of application may, indeed, incidentally lead a man to eminence in several directions. But a cultivated, a literary, or even a scientific man is not necessarily the best physician.” At the same time Dr. Bigelow concedes that there should be a certain latitude in the study of medical science on the ground that “no student or artisan is the worse for an outlook upon kindred arts and sciences which will help him to establish the true relations of his own, which will supply him with additional facilities and light for its pursuit, and with that training of his intellectual powers afforded by a systematic variation in their exercise.” It must be remembered that all the sciences collateral to medicine have undergone extraordinary development during the past few years; and that to acquire a very moderate knowledge of chemistry, for example— such knowledge as would enable the student to analyse a single animal fluid, or even a fragment of a calculus— would be the undivided work of a year, and when accomplished he would scarcely be one step in advance of the man who had learnt a few rules of general application to the diagnosis of disease taught by an accomplished chemist.
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Medical Education . Nature 6, 217–218 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006217a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006217a0