William Bartlett Dalby

“ If this be so, the very essence and goodness of a scientific education is lost when a student endeavors to pass his examinations by learning from text-books what he should have taught himself by observation, and from pictures what he should have learned from realities. ”

“ IN every system of education in which natural science forms no part, whatever knowledge the pupil gains is acquired from what he reads or from what he is told, and the truth of facts so presented to him he must take either upon trust or, in so far as they can be demonstrated to his reason, by logic or mathematics. In the study of natural science, on the other hand, he sees, he feels, he hears the same fact repeated again and again under the same conditions; and his informant is Nature—Nature, who never errs. Which is the better mode of acquiring information? ”

“ With all due respect to the authorities at our old universities, I can not but think that the time will come when the elements of physiology and chemistry will be considered as valuable a method of mental training as the production of what are fancifully termed Latin verses, as the study of the traditional records of Jewish history, or the learning by heart of sentences from Paley's "Evidences." In the work which you now propose to undertake you will require no one's evidences but those of your own senses, and any statement from your teachers you will be able to subject to such tests. ”

“ Those whose information is so gained have seized the shadow instead of the substance, and their work will for ever bear the marks of their indifferent education.
The results of the two modes of acquiring knowledge will be seen in the different classes of practitioners which they respectively produce. In the first order is the physician who intelligently studies physiology, who recognizes in pathology what I would, for the moment call an eccentric physiology ”

“ When you read or are told that an artery pulsates, that it is composed of so many coats, each possessing peculiar properties and uses, you will see and feel the artery to beat, you will examine its coats, you will see their properties exemplified in life, in death, in health, and in disease: in health, when it is divided by the knife, or tied to arrest hæmorrhage; in disease, when it is the seat of aneurism and other changes. ”

“ He knows what will cure something or other, and so prescribes it. So well is what I am saying beginning to be understood that the very expression "cure," unless applied with a special meaning, as to an aneurism, a hernia, or the like, has become almost offensive, and will ere long be used only by the ignorant and pretentious. The physician does not pretend to cure his patients; he places them in the conditions most favorable to recovery, and is thus often the means of averting death and conducting them to health. ”

“ You must not think that I am underrating the value of medicines; a large number of drugs we know well to be most useful and often necessaries in the treatment of disease, but the practice of ordering medicines to every patient who applies for relief is no longer the practice of physicians, although perhaps it may be followed by those who would on occasions be the last to resort to it, if they had the courage of their opinions. ”

“ You would be better almost without such miserably insufficient information. Besides, what you read may not be true; you will decide for yourselves whether it is or not. If you wish to see the result of an education which makes a man arrive at an opinion accurately, act boldly, display manual dexterity, and effect good results, you may see it in any of the surgeons while deligating an artery to cure an aneurism. ”

“ But pathology is better understood than it was a few years since, and with a more complete knowledge of morbid processes has come a corresponding knowledge of the frequent inability of drugs to control them ”