Moreover, I venture to say, that any man who has seriously studied all
the essential branches of medical knowledge; who has the needful
acquaintance with the elements of physical science; who has been
brought by medical jurisprudence into contact with law; whose study of
insanity has taken him into the fields of psychology; has _ipso facto_
received a liberal education.

Having lightened the medical curriculum by culling out of it everything
which is unessential, we may next consider whether something may not be
done to aid the medical student toward the acquirement of real
knowledge by modifying the system of examination. In England, within my
recollection, it was the practice to require of the medical student
attendance on lectures upon the most diverse topics during three years;
so that it often happened that he would have to listen, in the course
of a day, to four or five lectures upon totally different subjects, in
addition to the hours given to dissection and to hospital practice: and
he was required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this
distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end of three
years, he was set down to a table and questioned pell-mell upon all the
different matters with which he had been striving to make acquaintance.
A worse system and one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of
sound knowledge and to give full play to the "crammer" and the
"grinder" could hardly have been devised by human ingenuity. Of late
years great reforms have taken place. Examinations have been divided so
as to diminish the number of subjects among which the attention has to
be distributed. Practical examination has been largely introduced; but
there still remains, even under the present system, too much of the old
evil inseparable from the contemporaneous pursuit of a multiplicity of
diverse studies.