seems a hard saying,
but it is to be remembered that at that time the normal curriculum of
a medical student lasted only four years, a space of time barely
sufficient for the necessary minimum of purely medical and surgical
work. Huxley's view was that chemistry and physics, botany and
zooelogy, should be part of the general education, not of the special
medical education; he wished students to spend one or two years after
their ordinary career at school in work on these elementary scientific
subjects, and then to begin their medical course free from the burden
of extra-professional subjects. With certain limits due to the
different local conditions in different teaching centres Huxley's
system is being adopted. In most cases the authorities in medical
education are unable to leave the whole responsibility of the
elementary education in science to the schools from which medical
students come, as the conditions under which scientific subjects are
still taught in schools leave much to be desired. The average length
of the medical curriculum has been extended and the elementary
scientific subjects are taken first, sometimes at the medical
colleges, sometimes in the scientific departments of universities.
The interesting general point of view is that Huxley, although himself
a biologist and teacher of biology, took too broad an outlook on the
general policy of education to insist upon his own subject to the
detriment of the precise practical objects of the training of medical
students.

In the days of Huxley's greatest activity, while by the natural force
of events and by his special efforts science was becoming more and
more recognised as a necessary and important branch of general
education, the cry was raised against it that scientific education was
not capable of giving what is called culture. A scientific man was
regarded as a mere scientific specialist, and science was considered
to have no place in, and in fact to be an enemy of, "liberal
education." In 1880, at Birmingham, Huxley attacked this view in a
speech delivered at the opening of the Mason College. Sir Josiah
Mason, the benevolent founder of that great institution, had made it
one of the conditions of the foundation that the College should make
no provision for "mere literary instruction and education." This gave
Huxley a text for raising the whole question of the relation of
science to culture. He declared that he held very strongly by two
convictions.