c prelections we shall
work in more and more stuffing, more and more rubbish, more and more
irrelevant, useless detail which the student will get rid of just as soon
as he leaves us. Then the next thing will be a new organization, with an
examining board of first-rate practical men, who will ask the candidate
questions that mean business,--who will make him operate if he is to be a
surgeon, and try him at the bedside if he is to be a physician,--and not
puzzle him with scientific conundrums which not more than one of the
questioners could answer himself or ever heard of since he graduated.

Or these women who are hammering at the gates on which is written "No
admittance for the mothers of mankind," will by and by organize an
institution, which starting from that skilful kind of nursing which
Florence Nightingale taught so well, will work backwards through
anodynes, palliatives, curatives, preventives, until with little show of
science it imparts most of what is most valuable in those branches of the
healing art it professes to teach. When that time comes, the fitness of
women for certain medical duties, which Hecquet advocated in 1708, which
Douglas maintained in 1736, which Dr. John Ware, long the honored
Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, upheld within our
own recollection in the face of his own recorded opinion to the contrary,
will very possibly be recognized.

My advice to every teacher less experienced than myself would be,
therefore: Do not fret over the details you have to omit; you probably
teach altogether too many as it is. Individuals may learn a thing with
once hearing it, but the only way of teaching a whole class is by
enormous repetition, representation, and illustration in all possible
forms. Now and then you will have a young man on your benches like the
late Waldo Burnett,--not very often, if you lecture half a century. You
cannot pretend to lecture chiefly for men like that,--a Mississippi raft
might as well take an ocean-steamer in tow. To meet his wants you would
have to leave the rest of your class behind and that you must not do.
President Allen of Jefferson College says that his instruction has been
successful in proportion as it has been elementary. It may be a
humiliating statement, but it is one which I have found true in my own
experience.

To the student I would say, that however plain and simple may be our
teaching, he must expect to forget much which he follows intell