d about cuneiform
writings. Except for my mathematics and a mere modicum of chemistry I
had nothing on which to base my new work; and students coming from
Government free schools, or almost anywhere, had a great advantage
over men of my previous education; I did not even know how to study
wisely. Again, as Huxley showed, medical education in London was so
divided, there being no teaching university, that the curriculum was
ridiculously inadequate. There were still being foisted upon the world
far too many medical men of the type of Bob Sawyer.

There were fourteen hospitals in London to which medical schools were
attached. Our hospital was the largest in the British Isles, and in
the midst of the poorest population in England, being located in the
famous Whitechapel Road, and surrounded by all the purlieus of the
East End of the great city. Patients came from Tilbury Docks to
Billingsgate Market, and all the river haunts between; from Shadwell,
Deptford, Wapping, Poplar, from Petticoat Lane and Radcliffe Highway,
made famous by crime and by Charles Dickens. They came from Bethnal
Green, where once queens had their courts, now the squalid and crowded
home of poverty; from Stratford and Bow, and a hundred other slums.

The hospital had some nine hundred beds, which were always so full
that the last surgeon admitting to his wards constantly found himself
with extra beds poked in between the regulation number through sheer
necessity. It afforded an unrivalled field for clinical experience and
practical teaching. In my day, however, owing to its position in
London, and the fact that its school was only just emerging from
primeval chaos, it attracted very few indeed of the medical students
from Oxford and Cambridge, who are obliged to come to London for their
last two or three years' hospital work--the scope in those small
university towns being decidedly limited.

Looking back I am grateful to my alma mater, and have that real
affection for her that every loyal son should have. But even that does
not conceal from me how poor a teaching establishment it was. Those
who had natural genius, and the advantages of previous scientific
training, who were sons of medical men, or had served apprenticeships
to them, need not have suffered so much through its utter
inefficiency. But men in my position suffered quite unconsciously a
terrible handicap, and it was only the influences for which I had
nothing whatever to thank the hospita