for spending three months over the study of systematic botany. Again,
materia medica, so far as it is a knowledge of drugs, is the business
of the druggist. In all other callings the necessity of the division of
labour is fully recognised, and it is absurd to require of the medical
man that he should not avail himself of the special knowledge of those
whose business it is to deal in the drugs which he uses. It is all very
well that the physician should know that castor oil comes from a plant,
and castoreum from an animal, and how they are to be prepared; but for
all the practical purposes of his profession that knowledge is not of
one whit more value, has no more relevancy, than the knowledge of how
the steel of his scalpel is made.

All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say that any fragment of
knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary
pursuits, may not some day be turned to account. But in medical
education, above all things, it is to be recollected that, in order to
know a little well, one must be content to be ignorant of a great deal.

Let it not be supposed that I am proposing to narrow medical education,
or, as the cry is, to lower the standard of the profession. Depend upon
it there is only one way of really ennobling any calling, and that is
to make those who pursue it real masters of their craft, men who can
truly do that which they profess to be able to do, and which they are
credited with being able to do by the public. And there is no position
so ignoble as that of the so-called "liberally-educated practitioner,"
who may be able to read Galen in the original; who knows all the
plants, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop upon the wall; but who
finds himself, with the issues of life and death in his hands,
ignorant, blundering, and bewildered, because of his ignorance of the
essential and fundamental truths upon which practice must be based.