"Ideo Medico id in primis curandum, ut ab aegro circumstantias omnes accurate intelligat, intellectas consideret, ut inter curandum media illa adhibeat, quae tollendo morbo apta sunt, ne ex medicina nocumentum proveniat." --Basil Valentine, _Triumphal Chariot of Antimony_. [The physician must therefore especially take care that he understand all the circumstances of his patient very clearly, and after understanding them weigh them well, so that during his treatment he may use those means which are especially suited to control the disease, lest any harm should come from his medicine.] {377} UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOLS [Footnote 25] [Footnote 25: Address to the graduates of St. Louis University Medical and Dental Schools, May 31, 1910, at the Odeon, St. Louis.] It affords me great pleasure to accept the invitation of your Faculty to address the graduates of a university medical school here in the Middle West. I wondered, of course, what I should talk to you about, and have come to the conclusion that as an historian of medicine any message I may have for you is likely to come from my own subject. It so happens that we are just beginning to realize that the history of medicine may have much greater significance for us than we have usually been accustomed to think, and, above all, that it may mean much in furnishing incentive for the maintaining and raising of standards in medical education. In recent years there has come a very decided improvement in medical education in the United States. It is not hard to understand that the foreigner lifts his eyebrows in surprise when he is told that most of our medical schools a generation ago required but two terms of four months each, and that there was then just beginning to be a demand for a little more complete course and better facilities. There was a large number of medical schools, turning out graduates every year with the degree {378} of doctor of medicine, which was a license to practise in every state in the Union, for there were no state or federal laws regulating the practice of medicine. As for preliminary requirements the less said the better. If a man could write his name and, indeed, he did not have to write it very plainly, he found it easy to matriculate in a medical school and to be graduated at the end of two scant terms of four months each. He might come from the mines, or from the farm, or from before the mast, or from the smithy, or the carpenter shop; he need know nothing of chemistry, nor physics, nor of botany, nor of English and, above all, of English grammar, and he was at once admitted to what was called a professional school and graduated when he had served his time. Practically no one was plucked. The desire of the faculty for numbers of students forbade that in most cases. The two terms in medicine were not even successive courses. The second-year student listened, as a rule, to the same lectures that he might have heard the preceding year.