ceived attention at all commensurate with its vital bearing upon the well-being—spiritual as well as physical—of those whom the universities equip. So long as a knowledge of the human frame was looked at from the standpoint of the dispenser of mysterious drugs to a mysterious organism for the purpose of expelling mysterious foes; so long as the body was regarded chiefly as a more or less disreputable tabernacle for the temporary uses of the soul; so long as its harmonious and significant relationship to other forms of being lay largely beyond our ken; so long, I say, as all these conditions prevailed, accurate knowledge of the body and the factors necessary to its physical well-being did not command attention in the higher educational outlooks.
The equipment which I urge is in no sense medical, nor is it such as encourages the fancy to linger upon trivial ailments or inspires the dread of disease. For it should be remembered that the fundamental facts of anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and sanitation do not belong particularly to medicine, as is too often hastily assumed. This knowledge is indeed especially useful to the physician, and upon it he builds up into the domain of medicine. But it is a part of the common stock of world lore. And I do not think that there are any forms of provisional knowledge among those which candidates for admission to the colleges are required to possess more important than this.
Nor can I regard any schedule for the higher education, no matter what the calling to which it is initiatory, as adequately comprehensive which does not embrace definite and well-balanced instruction in the more advanced knowledge of the human body, its relationship to other forms of being, and the means through which it best can serve those larger purposes of life which the university inspires. One often marvels at the pitiful ignorance of the body and of the simplest principles of healthy living common among learned and cultured men and women to-day. Ashamed not to know the origin of a word, or to fail in the comprehension of a literary allusion, masters in theology, wise in the law, keen in business, versatile and brilliant in society, they are prone to court disaster in senseless modes of life, and fall easy victims to charlatans and unscrupulous drug venders—an association which they share with the illiterate and uncultured in a fashion highly democratic, and which suggests the survival of traits less incongruous and much more picturesque in the North American Indian.
Our new outlooks in medicine have not been won without toil and sacrifice on the part of its devotees, and these will still be necessary. But it is evident that in the medical colleges there must now be fuller endowment of research and more adequate provision for instruction, not only in the traditional themes of
