tendency is to degrade professional education to the very lowest level.

Nor is this all. In many instances the Examiners are paid according to the number of students they pass, and hence their self-interest is adverse to upholding a high standard of education, which can alone reflect credit on the Profession, and properly qualify Practitioners for the service of the public. On the contrary, they are prompted to strain points to pass as many candidates as possible, no matter how wretchedly qualified they may be sending them forth licensed to commit manslaughter with impunity. Medical practitioners are just what they are educated to be, as a rule, neither better nor worse than the average of other men who earn their bread by following a vocation. The vices of their practice, therefore, may be considered not so much those of the individuals, as of the pernicious system that fosters incompetency, and legally recognises it as "duly qualified."

It is somewhat remarkable that individual members of the General Medical Council have been among the most emphatic in lamenting the present degraded state of the Profession as regards intellectual capacity, educational attainments, and professional knowledge. The President, in his opening address at the annual meeting of the Council, May 29, 1867, said—“ If our profession, as a whole, is still to bear the name of, and be regarded as, one of the learned professions, then, undoubtedly, those who enter upon it ought to have received that amount of mental culture, and ought to be capable of passing a preliminary examination on subjects of general education, which shall at any rate be equivalent to the examinations which are passed by those who are entering upon the clerical profession, by those who are entering upon the legal profession, the army, and civil service of the country." No one is likely to dispute this, yet it is notorious that the profession swarms with members who are shamefully illiterate-whose opinions on any subject of general literature or of science, are wholly undeserving of respect.

Dr. Alexander Wood, a member of the Council, at the meeting, May 30, declared: "It is a matter of notoriety, that many students are allowed to enter upon the studies of their profession with an amount of education that would be notoriously disgraceful even to pupil teachers in schools. I have no hesitation in saying, that even in spelling and English composition they are not fit to stand upon the same platform with the pupil teachers of the village schools of Scotland. Now, I say this is a disgraceful state of matters."

Sir Dominic Corrigan, at the same meeting, said: "I, myself, within the last three weeks, have known an instance of candidates going from one licensing body to another, and obtaining a licence without being able to write Latin or Greek." Yet the medical is called a "learned" profession, and prescriptions are presumed to be written in a sort of hieroglyphic Latin !

Professor Bennett, of Edinburgh, as quoted by Dr. Acland, a member of the council, at the meeting, June 3, says: "That in a profession, such as that of medicine, there should exist, not only in the same country, but in the same city, various examining boards, so managed that the candidate who is incapable of passing one can rush to another with almost the certainty of obtaining his licence, is a scandal to the community such as should be abolished." "This opinion," remarks Dr. Acland, "is not singular, and it is not original, but it is just, it is very pregnant, and it is to the point."

In an address to the British Medical Association, at the annual meeting held in Dublin, August, 1867, Sir Dominic Corrigan made some strange disclosures. He said, that "under the present system, young men get into our profession who could not pass an examination for the place of a letter carrier!” Again"it is notorious that students know as well in regard to their diplomas, as buyers do in regard to the articles of purchase, where they will get what they want on the easiest terms; they go there, and become the possessors of what they wantdiplomas, it matters not good or bad, for the legal brand in the form

of a registry declares, under Act of Parliament, that all are equal.” And again—"It is notorious, that in both Germany and America there are Universities that sell their diplomas just as they sell beer or Indian corn, to all who can afford to pay for them."* It is equally notorious that they are bought by British practitioners, and that after all they are not a less certain test of merit than the great bulk of the thirty licenses, and fifty-four titles to practice which are as notoriously sold by the nineteen licensing bodies of the United Kingdom.

The Professor of Surgery in Dublin University, Mr. R. Smith, in his address at the same meeting, complained of "the almost systematic neglect upon the part of the junior members of the profession of the writings of the surgeons of the past generation." He further said: "From my long experience as a lecturer, and as an examiner, I have no hesitation in saying that not one student in a hundred ever reads the writings of Pott, of Hey, of Abernethy, of the Bells, the Monroes, of Colles, and a crowd of other master minds that have stamped their fame upon the history of surgery."* But is this not the fault of the avaricious Licensing Bodies, who care nothing about the proper education and qualification of students, in comparison with their own mercenary interests? If the profession is so deplorably illiterate, the fault surely lies with the nineteen licensing bodies who, competing for fees, grant licenses to illiterate and incompetent candidates ?

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As the Medical Press and Circular, June 26, 1867, says Dutch Auction of Diplomas exists in the profession, in which those corporations who desire to maintain a high standard of professional competency are, by the competition of less scrupulous bodies, absolutely starved into a reduction of their requirements. The amount of medical capacity which the public have a right to expect from the profession, is taxed down to a disgracefully insufficient amount by a system which makes it impossible for high classed education to be maintained."

* British Medical Journal, August 10, 1867.

Ibid., August 17, 1867.

Professor Syme, at the meeting of the General Medical Council, June 7, 1867, gave us a glimpse behind the scenes. He afforded some insight into the murderous practices of the illiterate empirics with which the profession now swarms- I have known," said he, "diseases of the rectum treated as diarrhoea by physicians who were not acquainted with the subject. They treated them with their opiates, and so on. (Cries of 'order.') I think it quite right I should bring this forward. No man should be considered a duly qualified practitioner unless he has studied and been examined in every part of his profession. No man's name should appear on the Registry without a full and entire professional education."*

This is very excellent theory no doubt, but how does it accord with practice?-how does it harmonize with the existing state of things?

"The rivalship in the different licensing bodies for the possession of fees still goes on, each striving to undersell the other in the facility with which they permit their diplomas to pass from their strong box into the student's pockets; and the result is a lamentable state of ignorance among men who had been pronounced competent to deal with the lives and limbs of their fellow-men."-Dublin Medical Press, Jan., 1864.

"At present it is perfectly clear, that a number of men get into the Register and practice who are dangerously ignorant of the elementary parts of professional knowledge, and that certain examinations which entitle men to a place on the Register, afford no guarantee of fitness."-Lancet, June, 1865.

"We have had notorious and very flagrant instances in very late years, where certain collegiate institutions have sprung up suddenly from poverty to comparative wealth by the sale of diplomas to all who choose to buy them."-Medical Circular, March, 1864.

Such a disgraceful state of affairs compelled the Directors of the Army and Navy Medical Departments to refuse the Diplomas, Degrees, and Licenses of every one of the whole nineteen Licensing Bodies, as evidence that the parties holding them were duly qualified to practice. They, therefore, instituted

*The extracts from the proceedings of the General Medical Council are taken from the report in the Medical Times and Gazette of June 1, 8, 15, and 22, 1867.

Examining Boards of their own, so that parties who have been licensed as "duly qualified" to practice by English, Irish, or Scotch Colleges and Universities must, if they desire to be employed in the Army or Navy, submit to another and independent examination, to test their capacity. At a recent examination "the Army Board," says the Medical Times, "rejected 31 out of 120 candidates, the Navy Board 21 out of 49. The inference is, that nearly one-third of those who are declared by Examining Boards having a pecuniary interest in the statement, to be fully qualified to practice the healing art amongst all her Majesty's subjects, are found by independent Boards to be more or less ignorant and unqualified to treat her Majesty's soldiers and sailors!"

Dr. D. F. Rennie, Surgeon 20th Hussars, says on this subject: "It stands to common sense, that if qualified medical practitioners are not fit to treat British soldiers without being specially tested, they must be certainly equally unfit to treat her Majesty's ordinary, but apparently less fortunate subjects. Such at least is the unvarnished conclusion that the present system inevitably leads to.-Letter in Lancet, August 24, 1867.

Referring to the rejection of licensed practitioners who have applied for Army and Navy appointments, the Medical Times says: "It must excite the gravest astonishment and reprehension, that men so grossly ignorant of their profession as these diplomatized candidates proved to be, could have found it possible to obtain any qualification from any licensing body whatever. How can we wonder that medical men should but too often make such a pitiable figure in practice, in the witness-box, and before the educated public in general, when we hear such confessions of gross incapacity, and dullness all over." -Medical Times, May, 1864.

In reference to the candidates rejected by the Army and Navy Board of Examiners, Sir Dominic Corrigan, in his address observed: Each candidate rejected represents a group of others equally ignorant and incompetent, who have passed some of our licensing bodies, are now on the registry as duly qua