Should comparative anatomy be included in a medical course? / by Burt G. Wilder.

  • Wilder, Burt G. (Burt Green), 1841-1925.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Should comparative anatomy be included in a medical course? / by Burt G. Wilder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    2. It serves as a means of mental training. Surely men- tal training of any kind, and by any method, implies the ac- quisition or cultivation of the following powers : (1.) Accuracy of observation. (2.) Thoroughness of comparison. (3.) Logic of conclusion. (4.) Clearness of definition. (5.) Desire for verification. (6.) Discrimination between the proved and the merely probable. (8.) Respect for, yet absolute independence of, authority. The educational value of the natural history sciences has been, of late years, often insisted on, and by none more em- phatically than Prof. Huxley, in the Lay Sermons and elsewhere. Indeed, the claim has been more or less fully al- lowed by nearly all excepting those who, having studied books alone, seem unable to conceive that any good thing can come out of that which hath not been printed, or at least written, by a man. Life is so short, and his art is so very long, that the physi- cian, like the naturalist, is generally forced to look upon purely linguistic studies as means to an end, as tools for his work. Still, it is to be hoped that few medical men have been obliged to literally adopt the suggestion contained in the fol- lowing passage ; Any lawyer oi- doctor who cannot learn by heart, in a week, all the technical terms and phrases of Latin origin which he encounters in his common professional occupation, has not wits enough for his calhng. — President Eliot^ Inaugural Address. I should, indeed, be the last to insist that the study of languages may not likewise subserve, the mental training of those who, on other grounds, may select them as their especial field for cultivation ; for I have endeavored to show the strik- ing similarity of linguistic and natural-history studies in re- spect to the number and importance of exceptions to nearly all general rules, and even to the exceptions themselves (23). It is the knowledge of exceptions, and the readiness to ac- cept them, which distinguish the mere teacher from him who ''professes to have derived his information from Mature her-