may be the better or the worse for the kind of medical education given in Scotland. Their life or death may depend on it. Apart from the mere technical questions connected with medical education, the public, who are the doctors' masters, and for whose service they are created, should know the general principles on which that education is now conducted, and should be encouraged to interest themselves in many, even of the details of modern medical schooling. Nowadays, the more the public know about the basis of all technical and professional institutions the better. The more every father and mother of a family understands of the principles of medical education the better, for they are as responsible for the health of their children as for their morals; and their sons and daughters may themselves want to become doctors. The more correct the knowledge every Member of Parliament, and indeed every member of a Town or County Council, has of the qualifications required for a good doctor, the better it will be for the profession of medicine and for the public, whose health and well-being he is bound to conserve. When a man gets a diploma entitling him to practise medicine, he receives many valuable privileges with the view of his doing many responsible duties to the public. The profession of medicine is now urgently claiming a voice in framing sanitary and other laws; and it is the natural vehicle through which many of these laws, when passed, are carried out for the benefit of the community. The public should know not only how the doctor of to-day is made, but should understand to some extent the evolution of modern medical education. The medical student of 1893 has to study many things not required of his predecessor of 1883; and the methods and scope of his education have totally changed in manner and degree during the past forty years. Within twelve months an extra year has been added compulsorily to his period of study before he is allowed to come up to any examining board for a diploma, that is 25 per cent. to the four years needed previously-one fourth more in effort and cost and a deduction of one thirtieth off his average money earning period of life. This means that the ideal of medical education has risen, and that its practical requirements have greatly expanded in recent years.

Let any one, when his life is in the balance, try to realise what he would like his doctor to be and to know. It does not need a vivid imagination in any man to conceive how mnch may depend on his doctor's knowledge, on his skill, and on his experience. It is a trite question, 'What is life without health?' Few persons but have had its truth vividly before their minds when in pain or weakness. One's doctor may make all the difference whether life is worth living or not. He is welcome when no one else is admitted. Not only his knowledge and skill and practical resource, but his tone of mind, his honour, his courage, his sympathy and his innate power of inspiring confidence, may make a vast difference to any of us, a difference it may be between sanity and insanity, between penury and competence, or even between life and death. Few realise how much they are dependent on the sense of duty and the honour of the doctor apart from his professional skill. What do they know about the effects of the powerful drugs he gives? How can they detect or counteract his mistakes? Their bodies and their lives are in his hands far more absolutely than are the lives and fortunes of his subjects in the power of any Eastern despot. From the public point of view the profession of medicine is filling year by year a larger space. The community is looking to it for more light and leading about sanitation, about education, about the choice of occupations and professions for young people, about how to keep well and happy. Practical questions connected with heredity loom in the near future. Well might Mr. Gladstone say that of all the professions it is the one which is in the ascendant at present. Mr. Disraeli did not without cause construct his epigram Sanitas sanitatum omnia sanitas,' as being the question of questions at present. Lord Salisbury has lately added his emphatic concurrence as to the power and usefulness of the medical profession in modern life.

Let any intelligent man try to picture an ideal doctor, and, though he will not succeed, for he does not know enough of the requirements, he will soon realise what an efficient medical education means, and the manner of men who should have the education of the doctor of the future. Let any man get and place before himself a series of the text books of to-day in the various

subjects that must be studied by the medical student, and glance through them sufficiently to see the multiplicity and variety of the knowledge contained in these books, and he will have no doubt whatever that to master these subjects in any sense must require the best five years of any life. He will find that a minimum of 10,000 octavo pages of close print must be read, marked, and digested. If he then tries to imagine that every one of those great volumes only contains the theory and the word-description, while the practice and the real knowledge of its subject must be obtained in the dissecting room, the laboratory, the hospital, the dispensary, the sick room of the poor, and the asylum, he will be verily appalled by the task before every young man and woman beginning the study of medicine. There is not one of those subjects but takes the whole undivided time of many experts of great mental energy to cultivate it. Anatomy, which deals with the form and relations of all the organs and structures of the body, from the largest to those that need a microscope of high power to see; physiology, the science of normal life and function, and pathology, the science of abnormal life, structure and function, are the three great basal sciences on which the doctor's whole superstructure of professional knowledge and practice must rest. The knowledge in regard to the two last, physiology and pathology, are in a continual state of advance and flux, so that the text books of ten years ago are antiquated to-day. The proper study of these implies a mind eager to question, and, if possible, to penetrate the occult secrets of life. that have fascinated and puzzled the greatest minds among mankind in all civilized ages. Surgery and medicine, the technical parts of his course, are different and wide domains of knowledge, yet the student has to know them, or he can be of no service at all. All the 'ills that flesh is heir to' are there depicted, so that in the hospital and by the bed-side they may be diagnosed and treated. Knowledge and modes of treatment, and technique too, are ever advancing and changing, and his teachers, year by year, must advance. Most surgical operations are very different procedures now from what they were twenty years ago. Midwifery, and the diseases peculiar to women and children, must be studied carefully, for they form a

large part of every medical man's practice. The 'specialties,' diseases of the eye, the ear, the throat, the mind and fevers, all claim some attention, and all are pushing their importance on him. Let any man go with a doctor in busy general practice, for a week, and see what he has to do each day, and the problems he has to solve, and we venture to say that he will be amazed at the extent of the practical skill and scientific knowledge called into exercise, and will be surprised that even in a five years course of instruction he could have acquired it all. He has daily to see from 20 to 40 patients, almost all suffering from different complaints; his advice is asked about a dozen questions in each case, each needing wisdom as well as knowledge. His memory crammed with secrets which he must not in honour divulge. To say that he must be a man of high moral tone is a truism. He must, in addition to common morality, have that delicacy of mind and that healthiness of moral constitution to which pruriency and smallness are absolutely unknown. His very presence should abash certain evil modes of looking at things. His whole life should be a public and private example.

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If any one will take a good Annual Report of an ordinary Medical Officer of Health of a County, and peruse it carefully, he will see what a medical education means in that direction. The topography of the County, the climate, the rainfall, the occupation of the inhabitants, the diseases they are subject to, and that they die of; the kind of houses they live in; the epidemics that have been prevalent, with the modes of isolating and arresting their progress, are all treated of. Such documents freely circulated and read are one of the very best popular sources of education in health and sanitation. The Reports of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, and the Reports of the Registrar General, are documents of supreme importance to the community. They are often marvels of industry, of patient searching out of causes of disease, and of profound scientific reasoning. They all depend on the knowledge modern medicine has given us, and are all written for the good of the public. They often treat of the effect of environment on health in a way that is most instructive to legislators. The mere enumeration of the different death-rates among the various trades and professions,

with a medical commentary on the causes of the great differences that are found to exist, touches questions that affect every man who has his living to earn, and some of the people who are so unfortunate as to be idle. Some of the Blue Books, such as the Report of the Board of Supervision and the Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy, are full of medical facts, needing interpretation to the public for their information and guidance. In all these documents, and their value to the nation, medical education plays a part.

In any account of the medical schools of Scotland, that of Edinburgh must stand out above all the others, overshadowing them by her marvellous success, and having influenced them all by her example and through having sent to them men imbued by her spirit and trained in her class rooms to be their most successful teachers. Her spirit has gradually pervaded the other schools, so that in their modern history they all may be truly said to be her children. With her 2,000 medical students, drawn from every quarter of the world, only about 45 per cent. of them being Scottish, her yearly output of 450 medical graduates and licentiates, her list of illustrious medical teachers, investigators and authors, and her position as the second or third medical school in the world in number of students, the gray metropolis of the North may well be proud of what she has achieved in the past and is now doing for medicine, and through it, for humanity. Edinburgh had no special advantages for developing a great medical school, such as the endowed hospitals of London gave the metropolis. She gradually, almost tentatively, produced a system of teaching largely her own, and she has always had an abundance of earnest and enthusiastic men to devote their lives and best energies to teaching, and to hand on the torch from one generation to another. Medical teaching in Edinburgh did not begin in the University, and has never been confined to the University, yet for a century and a half the University has been its centre. The Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians both began the teaching of Anatomy, Surgery, and Medicine before any Medical Faculty existed in the University, or any real medical teaching existed there. Eight of the Medical Chairs were instituted at the instance of the Royal Colleges. The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh,