Medical education, character, and conduct : introductory addresses, delivered to students of medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1855-1866-1882 / by W.T. Gairdner.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical education, character, and conduct : introductory addresses, delivered to students of medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1855-1866-1882 / by W.T. Gairdner. 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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    enough to enter hospitals, but they gained more than an equivalent for these losses in their better education and their greater self-respect. They gained an advance in intellectual training which rendered them better able than their prede- cessors to grapple with the complicated problems so often presented by disease.” It thus appears that the changes introduced by the Medical Act of 1858 into English medical education were in a great measure those which had been in operation in Scot- land long before, under the influence of our three teaching Universities, and the medical schools associated with them in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Not that I wish you to infer that our state was all that could be desired, 01- even all that, under more favourable conditions of medical legislation, it might have become. The Apothecaries’ Com- pany, which I by no means wish to disparage, inasmuch as it has honourably striven to fill a position left to it by the other corporations, and thus to maintain the organisation of the medical profession in England, long enjoyed a practical monopoly for its licentiates of most of the offices in that division of the kingdom which formed the usual introduction to general practice. The Royal College of Physicians during the same period long declined to admit, even as licentiates, any but the graduates of Oxford or Cambridge; thus aiming at a degree and kind of exclusiveness which effectually barred all possibility of its becoming the college of the medical pro- fession. The Royal College of Surgeons, with a much more generally accessible, and therefore more popular, diploma,