to an age of accepted dogma or supposedly complete information, when the professor "knew" and the students "learned." The lecture indeed continues of limited use. It may be employed in beginning a subject to orient the student, to indicate relations, to forecast a line of study in its practical bearings; from time to time, too, a lecture may profitably sum up, interpret, and relate results experimentally ascertained. Text-books, atlases, charts, occupy a similar position. They are not, in the first place, a substitute for sense experience, but they may well guide and fill out the student's laboratory findings. In general, the value of the recitation and of the quiz is in proportion to their concreteness and informality. Outside the workshop there is danger of detachment and rote.
The curriculum of a medical school, requiring for admission at least a competent knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology, offers in the first two years systematic instruction in the following subjects:
First year: anatomy, including histology and embryology; physiology, including bio-chemistry.
Second year: pharmacology, pathology, bacteriology, physical diagnosis.
A brief discussion will show the relations of these subjects to each other and to the clinical work occupying the third and fourth years.
The order in which subjects are taken up is largely determined by considerations inherent in the subjects themselves. Anatomy—the study of the architecture of the body—comes logically first. It is indeed the oldest of laboratory sciences,[1] and so fundamental in medical study that for a time the student may well defer all other subjects whatsoever. For several centuries it was taught simply by professorial demonstration. During the first half of the nineteenth century, gross dissection by the students themselves was in vogue. The subject, long almost a closed book, has tremendously expanded in recent years. Embryology, histology, physiology, and pathology have given it back its youth; it is once more a green and flourishing science.[2] The anatomist carries a steadily increasing load. The surgeon, embarking on hitherto undreamed-of ventures; the clinician, guiding himself by physical indications involving the most delicate structural discrimination; the physiologist, the pharmacologist, the pathologist,—all lean upon him. With an eye to varied uses, the student must gain a picture of the body as a working whole; of its parts, taken severally and in their relations; and finally of the microscopic structure of tissues and organs. The teacher of anatomy may take one of two roads. He may attempt to forecast literally the special requirements of each of the above branches, confining his instruc-
- ↑ "For over six hundred years there has been at least some practical instruction in anatomy, and for over three hundred years there have existed anatomical laboratories for purposes of teaching and investigation, although only those constructed during the present century (nineteenth) meet our ideas of what an anatomical laboratory should be." Welch: The Evolution of Modern Scientific Laboratories: an Address delivered at the Opening of the William Pepper Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Dec. 4, 1895.
- ↑ For an extremely readable account of the development of the science and teaching of anatomy, see "Anatomy in America," by C. R. Bardeen, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, no. 115.
