its future. That in which I am interested, and about which I wish to
speak, is the subject of medical education, and I venture to speak
about it for the purpose, if I can, of influencing you, who may have
the power of influencing the medical education of the future. You may
ask, by what authority do I venture, being a person not concerned in
the practice of medicine, to meddle with that subject? I can only tell
you it is a fact, of which a number of you I dare say are aware by
experience (and I trust the experience has no painful associations),
that I have been for a considerable number of years (twelve or
thirteen years to the best of my recollection) one of the examiners in
the University of London. You are further aware that the men who
come up to the University of London are the picked men of the medical
schools of London, and therefore such observations as I may have
to make upon the state of knowledge of these gentlemen, if they be
justified, in regard to any faults I may have to find, cannot be held
to indicate defects in the capacity, or in the power of application of
those gentlemen, but must be laid, more or less, to the account of the
prevalent system of medical education. I will tell you what has struck
me--but in speaking in this frank way, as one always does about the
defects of one's friends, I must beg you to disabuse your minds of
the notion that I am alluding to any particular school, or to any
particular college, or to any particular person; and to believe that
if I am silent when I should be glad to speak with high praise, it is
because that praise would come too close to this locality. What has
struck me, then, in this long experience of the men best instructed in
physiology from the medical schools of London, is (with the many and
brilliant exceptions to which I have referred), taking it as a whole,
and broadly, the singular unreality of their knowledge of physiology.
Now, I use that word "unreality" advisedly: I do not say "scanty;" on
the contrary, there is plenty of it--a great deal too much of it--but