We have quoted at length this vivid and accurate portrayal of the distinctive feature of British methods of clinical instruction in order to emphasise the fact that in the teaching of psychological medicine the British utterly neglect this excellent method of instruction which Dr. Flexner considered so admirable a feature of our medical schools. The British method of teaching psychological medicine, so far as the subject is taught at all,[84] is that of class-demonstration, but, as we have seen, the avoidance of exclusive reliance upon this method is the feature on which Dr. Flexner congratulates the British schools. On the other hand, while the Germans are criticised for their adherence to the class-demonstration, it should be remembered that, although this source of weakness appears in their undergraduate classes, it is they and not we who provide facilities, in their clinics, to the post-graduate student for free contact with patients in incipient stages of mental illness. Therefore we have neglected to apply, in the case of mental diseases, the very methods which in all other branches of medicine have been so conspicuously successful as to be selected by an impartial critic as the distinctive merit of British medical training. We have indicated briefly the type of instruction in psychiatry obtaining in our medical schools at present. Its educational value is certainly very slight; and—what is worse—it serves to give the future doctor a hopeless outlook on insanity. For the instruction of students in the nature and treatment of tuberculosis we do not send them to some sanatorium to gaze upon patients dying from the disease. They personally examine patients in the early stages and learn to recognise the subtler manifestations of the onset of the tubercular attack, when there is some hope of giving useful advice and saving the sufferer. Why cannot mental disease be dealt with in the same way? Why cannot our students be afforded, in general hospitals, the opportunity of personally examining patients in the incipient stages of mental disturbance? They would then not only acquire a knowledge of the real nature of insanity, but would also learn, in the school of experience, the individual differences which are exhibited in the working of the normal mind, a lesson which would be of the utmost value to them in dealing with _all_ their patients, whether their ailments be bodily or mental. But in addition such a training would impress on them, in a way that nothing else could do, the vitally important fact that mental disease is curable, and is not the hopeless trouble which is likely to be suggested by the spectacle of a few asylum patients in advanced stages of lunacy.