Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
It is no wonder that students from all over the world were attracted
to Alexandria for the next three centuries because of the
opportunities, for the study of medicine afforded them there. After
the first century of its existence not as much was accomplished as at
the beginning, because what always happens in the history of medicine
after a period of successful investigation, happened also there. Men
concluded that nearly everything that could be, had been discovered
and began to theorize. They were sure that their theories explained
things. Men have persisted in spinning theories in medicine. Theories
have almost never helped us and they always have wasted our time.
_Observation! Observation_ is the one thing that counts, Alexandria
continued to have her reputation, however, and in the first century of
the Christian era was the centre of medical interest. It was probably
here that St. Luke was educated, and as we know now from the careful
examination of the {391} Third Gospel and of the Acts, he knew his
Greek medical terms very well. Harnack has shown us recently once more
how thoroughly Luke converted the ordinary popular terms of the other
Evangelists into the Greek medical terms of his time. Luke must have
known medicine very well. His testimony to the miracles of Christ is
therefore all the more valuable, and so the Alexandrian medical school
has its special place in the order of Providence.
We are prone to think because of the curious way in which not only the
histories of medical education, but of all education, have been
written, that while there were some medical schools in the interval
from the days of Alexandria and Rome down to the modern time, these
were so hampered by unfortunate conditions that men practically did
nothing in education and, above all, scientific and medical education
until comparatively recent times. Nothing could well be more absurd
than such an opinion. The great universities founded during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries attracted more students to the
population of the countries of the time than go to our universities to
the number of our population in the present time. These universities
are the model of our universities of the present time and, indeed, the
history of many of the old European universities is continuous for
seven centuries. They had an undergraduate department in which
students were trained in grammar, rhetoric, logic, {392} arithmetic,
astronomy, music and gymnastics, and graduate departments of law,
theology and medicine. Professor Huxley, reviewing mediaeval
education, once said that the undergraduate education of the mediaeval
universities was better than our own. He doubted "that the curriculum
of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension
of what is meant by culture as this old trivium and quadrivium did."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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