The reciprocal duties of the medical profession and the community : being the inaugural address delivered at the sixty-sixth annual meeting of the British Medical Association / by Sir T. Grainger Stewart.

Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The reciprocal duties of the medical profession and the community : being the inaugural address delivered at the sixty-sixth annual meeting of the British Medical Association / by Sir T. Grainger Stewart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    To-day the profession has organised throughout the country many great and famous medical schools, and all the universities devote themselves more or less to medical education. That work, of course, can never be successfully accomplished except where great hospitals exist. The fame of the schools of Guy’s, of St. Bartholomew’s, of St. Thomas, has sprung from the splendid hospitals in connection with which they were formed, and the greatness of the Edinburgh school could never have been but for the Royal Infirmary, which among all hospitals stands out so eminently as a training ground of the profession. There is no need for me to speak to this audience of what medical education has now become, but I wish that all teachers could manage to make their instruction a training of the powers and mastering of the methods, rather than a loading of the memory with unnecessary facts and transient theories. I wish, also, that it were possible for the universities and schools to make more complete and satis- factory arrangements for post-graduate instruction, so that old students might return to the alma mater, and pick up in the course of a few weeks some knowledge of new methods and new facts whereby they might keep themselves more abreast of modern progress. Guarding the Portals. Another necessary duty is the testing of candidates for admission to our ranks. None hut experts can perform such a duty. This was recognised in the days of Henry VIII., when the authorities began to organise the process of admission to the profession. It was enacted that no one should practise medicine in the City of London or within seven miles of it unless he had been examined, approved, and