He will gratefully
recognize that the anatomist has furnished him with indispensable data,
that the physiologist has sometimes put him on the track of new modes of
treatment, that the chemist has isolated the active principles of his
medicines, has taught him how to combine them, has from time to time
offered him new remedial agencies, and so of others of his allies. But he
will also tell you, if I am not mistaken, that his own branch of
knowledge is so extensive and so perplexing that he must accept most of
his facts ready made at their hands. He will own to you that in the
struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts as in the
outside world of nature, much that he learned under the name of science
has died out, and that simple homely experience has largely taken the
place of that scholastic knowledge to which he and perhaps some of his
instructors once attached a paremount importance.
This, then, is my view of scientific training as conducted in courses
such as you are entering on. Up to a certain point I believe in set
Lectures as excellent adjuncts to what is far more important, practical
instruction at the bedside, in the operating room, and under the eye of
the Demonstrator. But I am so far from wishing these courses extended,
that I think some of them--suppose I say my own--would almost bear
curtailing. Do you want me to describe more branches of the sciatic and
crural nerves? I can take Fischer's plates, and lecturing on that scale
fill up my whole course and not finish the nerves alone.
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