tion will make additions on its own account, to the sum of the accomplishments which it inherits, and will care for its successor until it has gained the whole; and so the plan works on and progress is made.

Now, no one will maintain that the sophomore in our colleges, as he exists among us, masters anywhere near all the achievements of the race in any field; and if we go to turning him out into practical life with this equipment, we shall soon get to the end of our rope. Suppose he spends three years more in the study of some profession-law, or medicine, or engineering -will this give him time to reach the summit of human evolution in any direction? Can the physician acquire all that is known about his 'science, and gain all the skill in applying it to concrete cases that anyone possesses, in five years' application beyond the high school? There ought to be no particular difficulty in finding a true answer to this question. Take the testimony of those whose business it is to supply society with doctors of medicine; what do they say? They declare that, on the whole, young men, even college graduates, do not know enough when they get hold of them, and they cannot keep them under educational influences long enough for them thoroughly to acquire even the fundamental principles of medicine. Every important medical school desires its students to have the equivalent of at least a four-year college course before they knock at its doors for admission. And then, of course, after they get in, since every year sees important developments in the field of medicine, there is demanded a continually lengthening period of probation. The more that becomes known about the human body, and the way to treat it to keep it in health, and to restore it to this condition when it becomes diseased, the longer it will take the individual to acquire this knowledge. And if provision is not made for extending the learning period, it needs no unusual insight to discern the outcome in the long run. A youth who is permitted to discharge the function of physician in any community before he has possessed himself of the knowledge and skill that his predecessors developed strikes the welfare of that community a death-blow; and if this practice should continue, it would be only

a matter of time when by retrogressive movement the stage of civilization represented by the witch-doctor and sorceress would be reached.

If it should be said, as it is being said in some quarters now, that a boy will by his own effort keep moving onward after he separates himself from all educational agencies, it may be answered that both theory and practice disprove the proposition, as it applies to the majority of persons at any rate. Of course, physicians, like the members of many other professions, appreciate the necessity of keeping up with the times, and so they have their organizations for mutual helpfulness through discussion and stimulation; but yet everyone knows old doctors who are tampering with the human body today, who are administering drugs according to the custom of a century ago, and they are supremely ignorant of all that modern science has accomplished; and, what is worse, they are hostile to all the new-fangled ways. It is this state of affairs which led Holmes to say: "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes." Shakespeare, too, advised man to "throw physic to the dogs" and have none of it. The more or less general suspicion of the ordinary doctor, as able to heal disease, is indicated in a line from one of the old poets:

See one physician like a tiller plies,

The patient lingers, and by inches dies;

But two physicians, like a pair of oars,

Waft him more swiftly to the Stygian shores.

One not infrequently comes across a doctor who seems to be little more than a modern version of the wizard or conjurer. It is impossible for men of this stamp to continually readjust themselves to changing views and practices incident to progress, and so they ridicule the whole thing. When one gets a bread-and-butter relation to a situation, he quickly settles into the method of reacting upon it with which he begins, and which brings him a measure of success, and then he goes on doing the same thing over and over again. This is what makes it so imperative that he should not take the crucial step until he can summon for his

guidance all the help, all the light, all the wisdom, that can be obtained from any source. There is no other way by which we may conserve what has already been accomplished, and which will enable us to keep on subjugating, so to speak, ever larger domains of our environments, moral, intellectual, and physical.

Doubtless much can be accomplished in the direction of economy in our educational methods by cutting out work which is of relatively little value. To require of one who aspires to the practice of medicine long years of study of a dead language, for instance, is of doubtful expediency, to say the least. The problem of the comparative worth of the various branches of instruction is far from being satisfactorily solved yet, but still it seems highly probable that there are in our curricula today subjects that, while of considerable account in themselves for certain people, are nevertheless not worth the time and energy which are spent upon them by the great body of students. But even if all such comparatively worthless stuff should be banished from the schools, there would still remain enough, and more than enough, bearing directly upon the work of the physician, for instance, and which he gets but a taste of now as things go, to occupy him probably for a longer period than he at present gives to his preparation, not to speak of shortening this period. An engineer, in order to understand the modern engine in all its complexity, realizes that he must trace its evolution from its simplest beginnings to its present stage of development; and how much more essential it is that the physician, in order to comprehend this well-nigh infinitely complicated machine, the human body, should trace its evolution throughout ancestral history, seeking to discover how the whole has been elaborated, and what function has been assigned to each part! Is it too much to say that no youth should be allowed to hang out his shingle until he has mastered all that is known regarding the general plan and the details of construction of the human organism, until, as Voltaire urged, "having studied nature from his youth, he knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, and the remedies which will benefit it"? But there are men practicing among us who

are quite uninformed upon this subject, and who are unable in consequence to understand much that is being revealed by modern research respecting the causation of disease; and, true to the instincts of mankind, they oppose what they cannot comprehend, and so advance is impeded.

Again, it is well known today to students of the matter that the mind exerts a profound influence upon all vital function, and it seems that no one should be permitted to meddle with a man's health until he has been made thoroughly acquainted with whatever is well established regarding the relationships existing between mind and body. One of the old Roman philosophers had some sort of conception of the function of the physician treating the mind as well as the body. "Medicus nihil aliud est quam animi consolatio," he says-"A physician does nothing more than console the mind." Cicero says frequently that when the mind is in a disturbed condition, health cannot exist. But what proportion of the physicians now in service have any exact knowledge, so that they can use it advantageously, of the constitution of the human mind, and how it affects vital processes in its varied states and functionings ? If a law could be enacted requiring that every youth before he would be decorated with the badge of physician should, in addition to what is now commonly required of him, first master all that is known respecting the evolution of the human body and the influence of thought and feeling upon vital function, who can estimate to what extent society would be benefited by this one act?

And then the physician must be more than a physician in the strict and narrow sense; he cannot confine himself solely to treating the bodies of men; as a great force in the social organism, he ought to understand how society is constructed, and what conditions are essential for its health and prosperity. And especially ought he to have developed in him strong ethical and social impulses, so that he will give himself graciously and unstintedly to the service of his fellows— a matter which Plato made most prominent in his ideal republic. A highly trained man charged with the conduct of such momentous affairs, but whose motives and incentives are all self-centered, is likely often

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to be an enemy of, rather than a friend to, his kind. more, a physician has leisure time that must be spent in some manner, and how shall he dispose of it? In riotous living, as many do, in the saloon and gambling den? Or shall he turn rather to the music hall and the art gallery and the library? This is a very real and vital problem, as it relates to the welfare of society, though I know it is not commonly so regarded; and it is affected by the demand for shortening the period of education. Through music, art, and literature man has sought to express his ideals and make them permanent; and whatever has lived for long ages must have been found valuable. It must have developed a higher, a better, a more social kind of life; in brief, it must have been a means of adjusting men more happily to one another.

And the physician as a servant of society needs to be exposed to the inspiring and elevating influences of all the highest ideals the race has developed. If his interests center around the saloon and the gambling table, he really becomes a barrier to social progress. But anyone who has been brought much in contact with those who are supposed to be masters of the healing art knows that a goodly proportion of them feel more at home in the bar-room than in the library; they love to look upon the flowing bowl rather than upon some great painting. It is this condition of affairs which leads one to declare emphatically that physicians as a body need to get a training somewhere that will give them familiarity with, and strong interests in, the aspirations and ideals of the race as expressed in its literature and art and music.

And what has thus been said in mere outline of the education of the physician applies in principle to the training of every professional man. It is commonly heard in these times that the development of society is impeded because of the army of halfbaked lawyers that prey upon it. Conditions were not much better in Shakespeare's time, probably, for he says in Henry VIII.: "The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers." Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy says he thinks lawyers will "plead their