extend them.

I trust I have vindicated the apparent inconsequence of teaching young
students a good deal that seems at first sight profitless, but which
helps them to learn and retain what is profitable. But this is an
inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain height
knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man whose life
is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will be some sharp
questions asked by and by, and our quick-witted people will perhaps find
they can get along as well without the professor's cap as without the
bishop's mitre and the monarch's crown.

I myself have nothing to do with clinical teaching. Yet I do not
hesitate to say it is more essential than all the rest put together, so
far as the ordinary practice of medicine is concerned; and this is by
far the most important thing to be learned, because it deals with so
many more lives than any other branch of the profession. So of personal
instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval of
lectures, much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory, some
in the microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it has many
advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not wish to see
it shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me long enough
already.

If I am jealous of the tendency to expand the time given to the
acquisition of curious knowledge, at the expense of the plain
old-fashioned bedside teachings, I only share the feeling which Sydenham
expressed two hundred years ago, using an image I have already borrowed.
"He would be no honest and successful pilot who was to apply himself
with less industry to avoid rocks and sands and bring his vessel safely
home, than to search into the causes of the ebbing and flowing of the
sea, which, though very well for a philosopher, is foreign to him whose
business it is to secure the ship. So neither will a physician, whose
province it is to cure diseases, be able to do so, though he be a person
of great genius, who bestows less time on the hidden and intricate
method of nature, and adapting his means thereto, than on curious and
subtle speculation."

"Medicine is my wife and Science is my mistress," said Dr. Rush. I do
not think that the breach of the seventh commandment can be shown to
have been of advantage to the legitimate owner of his affections. Read
what Dr. Elisha Bartlett says of him as a practitioner, or ask one