insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits,
may not some day be turned to account. But in medical education, above
all things, it is to be recollected that, in order to know a little
well, one must be content to be ignorant of a great deal.

Let it not be supposed that I am proposing to narrow medical education,
or, as the cry is, to lower the standard of the profession. Depend upon
it there is only one way of really ennobling any calling, and that is to
make those who pursue it real masters of their craft, men who can truly
do that which they profess to be able to do, and which they are credited
with being able to do by the public. And there is no position so ignoble
as that of the so-called "liberally-educated practitioner," who, as
Talleyrand said of his physician, "Knows everything, even a little
physic;" who may be able to read Galen in the original; who knows all
the plants, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop upon the wall; but
who finds himself, with the issues of life and death in his hands,
ignorant, blundering, and bewildered, because of his ignorance of the
essential and fundamental truths upon which practice must be based.
Moreover, I venture to say, that any man who has seriously studied all
the essential branches of medical knowledge; who has the needful
acquaintance with the elements of physical science; who has been brought
by medical jurisprudence into contact with law; whose study of insanity
has taken him into the fields of psychology; has _ipso facto_ received a
liberal education.

Having lightened the medical curriculum by culling out of it everything
which is unessential, we may next consider whether something may not be
done to aid the medical student toward the acquirement of real knowledge
by modifying the system of examination. In England, within my
recollection, it was the practice to require of the medical student
attendance on lectures upon the most diverse topics during three years;
so that it often happened that he would have to listen, in the course of
a day, to four or five lectures upon totally different subjects, in
addition to the hours given to dissection and to hospital practice: and
he was required to keep all the knowledge he could pick up, in this
distracting fashion, at examination point, until, at the end of three
years, he was set down to a table and questioned pell-mell upon all the
different matters with which he had been striving to make acquaintance.
A wor