Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
without actually breaking with his profession, how is it possible for
him to pursue physiology?
I get every year those very elaborate reports of Henle and
Meissner--volumes of, I suppose, 400 pages altogether--and they consist
merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on
Anatomy and Physiology--only abstracts of them! How is a man to keep up
his acquaintance with all that is doing in the physiological world--in
a world advancing with enormous strides every day and every hour--if he
has to be distracted with the cares of practice? You know very well it
must be impracticable to do so. Our men of ability join our medical
schools with an eye to the future. They take the Chairs of Anatomy or
of Physiology; and by and by they leave those Chairs for the more
profitable pursuits into which they have drifted by professional
success, and so they become clothed, and physiology is bare. The result
is, that in those schools in which physiology is thus left to the
benevolence, so to speak, of those who have no time to look to it, the
effect of such teaching comes out obviously, and is made manifest in
what I spoke of just now--the unreality, the bookishness of the
knowledge of the taught. And if this is the case in physiology, still
more must it be the case in those branches of physics which are the
foundation of physiology; although it may be less the case in
chemistry, because for an able chemist a certain honourable and
independent career lies in the direction of his work, and he is able,
like the anatomist, to look upon what he may teach to the student as
not absolutely taking him away from his bread-winning pursuits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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