Besides the directly good effect of developing the students' faculties of observation and inductive reasoning the preliminary whiff of science all had to take gave a tone which was of high value to them. It redeemed the merely money-earning aspect of their craft, and helped to form an ideal of life in their youthful enthusiastic minds that soared beyond merely professional success. How few Edinburgh men have not, when in their first years of study, suffocated their landladies by the chemical fumes from all too primitive apparatus; or formed a herbarium in the summer vacation; or dug for geological specimens for live-long summer days in lonely quarries; or formed an inchoate collection of badly stuffed monstrosities intended to be a natural history museum! He did not then know it, but to the student's mental and moral nature, this short pursuit of the natural sciences before he settled down to his hard life's work, conveyed some breath of sweetness and light that never thereafter left him. Few of the great medical teachers of Edinburgh have been Doctors or Surgeons, and nothing more. Christison and Maclagan became Presidents of the Edinburgh Royal Society; Simpson began his lectures on midwifery with a course on embryology, and was besides a learned and enthusiastic antiquary. Laycock could

meet the psychologists on their own ground, and to a certain extent anticipated Darwin in his doctrine of Evolution, and Spencer in his philosophy. Lister is combined physiologist, chemist, pathologist, and bacteriologist. By such powerful influences and examples was the Edinburgh medical student widened and liberalised in his mental horizon all through his

course.

The professional and social tone of the school was high too in regard to money, to professional etiquette, and to a doctor's whole relation to his patient. A high standard was inculcated, and a good example was set. No doubt, one professor or lecturer would be at deadly feud with another, and made no secret of this to his class. It was a common thing for the student to hear Bennett ridicule and denounce in strong and picturesque language Alison's treatment of pneumonia one hour, and the next hear Christison, at the bed-side, contemptuously sneer at Bennett's doctrinaire ideas and practice; to listen with delight to Syme's

incisive thrusts at Miller, and Laycock's supercilious references to Bennett's crass ignorance. But such personalities seemed to add interest to the hour's lecture, and to leave no abiding harm. There can be no doubt that the system and the men in Edinburgh produced hard and enthusiastic students, well grounded in scientific methods, and fairly equipped for practice. They for the most part acquired a high professional tone and a largeness of mental vision that raised them above the mere giver of medical services in return for the proper fees. They had some of the divine love of knowledge for its own sake, and thereby breathed a purer air than mere professionals do. The school was fortunate in having its teachers come in many cases from good old Scotch families who gave a high social tone to the profession and secured for it a position in the city equal to any other class.

There are two great recent departments of medicine where Edinburgh has not taken the lead, and, indeed, has scarcely followed the English and Continental lead so quickly as she ought. Those departments are, preventive medicine and bacteriology. The City of Edinburgh, to her enormous credit, took the lead of every city in the world, under the guidance of Dr. Littlejohn, her Medical Officer of Health, in getting a local Act, whereby the medical men were obliged to notify to a central authority every case of infectious disease they were called on to treat. But the great preachers of pure air and water and plenty of them, clean drains, of healthy airy workshops and factories, were found in England, not in Scotland at first.

To sum up there are such obvious advantages in certain ways in the Edinburgh system that they have merely to be stated to be recognised. In addition to giving every man an opportunity of teaching, to the general stimulus of keen competition, to the provision for efficient teaching when a professor is getting old and past his best, to the training of men for professorships; there are other less considered advantages. It provides that the unfit as teachers are found to be unfit, and they retire. There is little or no temptation for either Professor or Lecturer to hold on beyond his period of efficiency. It provides too in the extra academical school for Lectureships on new subjects not in the

curriculum, but which will be useful to many students. In this way, long before they were taken up by the University, the students could obtain instruction in diseases of children, eye diseases and mental diseases, in diseases of the ear and throat, in diagnosis, in climatology, in medical electricity, skin diseases and fevers. These are taught by experts, often outside the University, and by young lecturers who are anxious to work and prove their capacity as teachers. Medicine and Surgery are both perhaps tending to split up into specialisms too much, especially in London, but some of the greatest advances have been made of late years through the principle of one able man devoting himself to a special department and sticking to that alone. The range of knowledge is getting too large for most men to master the whole, so a part is selected and worked out thoroughly.

Two vast building schemes have been undertaken and accomplished in Edinburgh in connection with its Medical School within the past thirty years. The Royal Infirmary was re-built on a new site at a cost of £350,000, and became the greatest and best equipped hospital in the kingdom. In 1874 the University determined to re-house its Medical School, and to build and provide for it class-rooms, museums, laboratory and teaching appliances, such as no British school as yet possessed. Partly by subscription among the friends of the University, and partly by a grant from Parliament, the present magnificent new buildings were erected at a cost of £230,000, and were opened in 1884.

Next to Edinburgh as a Medical School comes Glasgow. Its history is in many respects similar to that of the capital, with certain distinctive features. In the beginning of last century Glasgow University had no Professor of Medicine to examine a candidate for the degree of M.D., and had to call in for this purpose two doctors in practice in the city. In 1712 a Chair of Anatomy was established. But real teaching only commenced in 1746, when Cullen began to lecture outside the University with the sanction of the Professor. A Chair of Practice of Medicine was founded for him in 1751. His power as a teacher brought him students, among whom was Joseph Black, who afterwards in succession held the Chairs of Chemistry and Anatomy and of Practice of Medicine, and added greatly to the

fame of the University and to the number of its medical students. It was not, however, till the Glasgow Royal Infirmary was founded in 1794 that the medical teaching there became complete in principle. Without an hospital for Clinical instruction a Medical School in any proper sense cannot exist any more than a School of Art without living models, or a religion without a moral code. Glasgow, like Edinburgh, has owed much to competition in medical teaching; but the competition arose and now exists in a different way from that which exists in Edinburgh. The Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, like the Royal Colleges of Edinburgh, actively promoted medical teaching in and outside of the University before it was taken up there. It claims for itself truly that the earliest medical teaching was given under its auspices. Anderson's College began medical teaching in 1799, and it has continued it ever since, producing many men of eminence, a large number of whom have received promotion to Chairs in the University. It has been a nursery for University Professors all along. It is a cheap school and has given a chance of a medical education to poor men like Livingstone, the great African explorer. It will be an evil day for Scotland when poor men cannot attain professional or higher education through its being too expensive. Medical education has now come to cost a large sum. In London, the Student's Number of the British Medical Journal, for September 1893, puts down the minimum cost at the cheapest schools there, great economy being exercised in living, at £587, while in the provincial schools of England it is put down at £500. Now that is a sum which would have been absolutely prohibitive to very many Scotsmen who have greatly honoured the profession and benefited humanity by their work. We have no doubt that at the School of Medicine in Edinburgh, or at Anderson's College, or St. Mungo's, or at Aberdeen, a young man, by stern economies, which will do him no harm in the long run, could enter the medical profession for between £300 and £400. Since the University moved from the Old College Buildings to the magnificently appointed palace at Gilmorehill, and the New Western Infirmary was put beside it, four other schools of medicine have arisen in Glasgow. The Royal Infirmary, when most of the

University students went to the Western Infirmary, at once utilised its great clinical field by establishing a special school of its own; and within the past five years St. Mungo's College has arisen with a full teaching staff and with fees only amounting to £50 over the five years of study. A Western Infirmary School or Polyclinic' and St. Margaret's College for women complete the present list of six medical schools in the great city of the West.

The peculiarity of the system of competition in medical teaching in Glasgow is, that though very extensive it still is limited. There may be one Professor or Teacher of Surgery in each of the six schools, but there can be no more in ordinary circumstances, while in Edinburgh, as we have seen, there may be an unlimited number. Then, most of the Glasgow appointments have some endowment or definite position that may tempt an inefficient man, once installed, to hold on after his uselessness has become apparent. In Edinburgh, every man except the Professor in the University, may be literally starved out when he ceases to attract students. Free trade in teaching and death to the weakest is, as we have seen, the rule of the Edinburgh school, except that by the new ordinances the great queen bee in the University is now always to be kept moderately fat. Much may be said for both plans. The small endowment plan would certainly in many cases be an enormous blessing, and an incentive too, to young and able men of an original turn of mind but of small means. We think we have known men who might have turned out great medical lights had £200 a year been attainable for bread and butter during the first ten years of teaching and working, but who were lost to the school for the want of it. Simpson and the Edinburgh School narrowly escaped this fate.

Glasgow, during the first half of this century was, beyond any question, on a lower plane than Edinburgh in regard to the all pervading spirit of original investigation and scientific enthusiasm among its teachers, and also in the social position of the profession of Medicine. It taught men to practice Physic up to the standards then known in a creditable way; but its ideal was not high enough. When Dr. Allen Thompson went from teaching