In treating of a subject like that which I have chosen, it becomes necessary to adopt some plan of limitation, otherwise one would talk interminably. On this account I have resolved to give no details concerning the great London physicians and surgeons who flourished in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. If, therefore, I say nothing of Arbuthnot, Akenside, Mead, Pringle, Smellie, Baker, William and John Hunter, Cline, Sharpe, Percival Pott, Abernethy, Sir Charles Bell, Liston, Brodie, Astley Cooper, John Abernethy, William Lawrence, and many others, it is not from want of appreciation of their merits, but merely because to do so would take me too far. I purpose, therefore, to skip over the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and conclude my paper with a few remarks on the teaching of medicine in modern London. [Illustration: SURGEONS’ HALL, OLD BAILEY.] Fifty years ago medical schools were very different from what they are now. The teaching was far less thorough, the examinations far less complete. For example, according to Sir James Paget (“St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Fifty Years Ago”), it was the universal custom for students to be apprenticed in the country, and to spend eighteen months in London before going up for the College and Hall. The examination at the College of Surgeons was conducted by ten examiners, who sat at a semicircular table, was entirely _vivâ voce_, and lasted twenty minutes. The teaching for these examinations was entirely by lectures, and it was no uncommon thing for one man to lecture on more than one subject. Thus, at St. Bartholomew’s, Stanley, who was surgeon to the hospital, lectured on anatomy and physiology, and the senior physician on medicine and chemistry, while of clinical instruction there was practically none. The operating was swift and dexterous, the mortality after it great, “for there was scarcely a thought about blood infections ... none would hesitate to go straight from a dissection of a dead body to an operation on a living one, and at the first dressing of an amputation or any large wound the stench of the decomposing bloody fluid running from it was enough to infect the whole ward.” The nursing at that time was of a rough order. The nurses were often intemperate, and almost always women who morally and intellectually might fairly be classed among the lower orders. [Illustration: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GOWER STREET. [_To face p. 123._ ] MODERN MEDICAL SCHOOLS AND EXAMINATIONS.