The old-time medical traditions of education which in the mediaeval universities produced such men as William of Salicet and Lanfranc and Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac, persisted during the next two centuries in the southern countries of Europe, and then were transferred to America through Spain. The first American medical school was not, as has so often been said, at my own Alma Mater, the University of {371} Pennsylvania, which had its first lectures in 1767, while the Physicians and Surgeons of New York did not come for some ten years later and Harvard only in the following decade, but in the medical school of the University of Mexico, where the first lectures were held in 1578, and where a full medical school was organized before the end of the sixteenth century. In this medical school, which during the seventeenth century came to have several hundred students, the university tradition of the olden time was well preserved. Three years of preliminary study at the university were required before a student could take up the course in medicine, and four years of medical study were required before graduation. We have some of the text-books, and know much about the curriculum of this old medical school, and in every way it is worthy of the old university traditions. Unfortunately our universities in what is now the United States developed very slowly. King's College (Columbia) did not become a university in the sense of having law and medical schools as well as an undergraduate department until the nineteenth century had almost begun. Harvard did not have a law school affiliated with it until the first quarter of the nineteenth century had almost run its course. The affiliations between the medical schools and the universities in these cases was only very slight, and the medical schools were entirely in the hands of the {372} medical faculty, whose main purpose during a great part of the nineteenth century was to make medical studies as short as possible and as inexpensive as they could possibly be made for the faculty, because that left so much more of the fees to be absorbed by the historic septennate of professors who ruled and managed the university. The consequence was that during most of the nineteenth century two terms of four months each were all that was required for the diploma in medicine in most American medical schools. Three schools maintained a very high standard by requiring twenty weeks in each of two calendar years. The medical school that was considered one of the best in the country, and whose graduates obtained the highest marks in the army and navy examinations, that of the University of Virginia, required but two terms of four and one-half months each which might be taken in the same calendar year, and then gave the doctor's degree.