this young miner passed an excellent
examination, and received the unanimous vote of the medical faculty
for his degree. I mention this case, but every year there are several
similar; and we always find that the school-teachers and miners are by
no means at the foot of the graduating class.

Concerning clinical teaching, we have the following statement:
"The clinical teaching in an American hospital is comprised in the
following routine: Once or twice a week, from one to five hundred men
being congregated in an amphitheatre, the professor lectures upon a
case brought into the arena, perhaps operates, and when the hour has
expired the class is dismissed. Evidently, under such circumstances
there cannot be the training of the senses, the acquiring of a
knowledge of the hourly play of symptoms of disease and of familiarity
with the proper handling of the sick and wounded, which is of such
vital importance, and which can be the outcome only of daily contact
with patients." What can the writer of this sentence mean? Certainly,
no one knows better than he does that such _is not_ the practice in
the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Bellevue and in
many other large hospitals, where clinics and dispensary services
are held for _several hours daily_ throughout the year, and where the
student has furnished him abundant opportunities four "acquiring a
knowledge of the ... symptoms of disease, ... of handling the sick and
wounded," etc. etc. That the American medical student profits by these
opportunities, and learns his clinic lessons well, is proved by the
unexpected and evidently unintended testimony which occurs toward the
close of the article, where Dr. Wood says, "The great resources of the
medical profession in America were proved during the civil war, when
there was created in a _few months_ a service which for _magnitude_
and _efficiency_ has _rarefy if ever been equaled_. Indeed, military
medicine was raised by it to a point _never reached before_ that time
_in Europe_, and the results achieved have in many points worked a
_revolution in science_." The italics in this quotation are mine, as
they also are in those which follow.

But (says the article under review) "the largest proportion of our
prominent physicians have educated themselves after graduation." As
if this were an extraordinary or unusual circumstance! Certainly,
they have; and so have all prominent men in all professions and all
pursuits of li