There is much truth in this. There is much truth also in the fact that while more is taught, more, infinitely more, is demanded of the student, and the knowledge that would have secured him a diploma fifty years ago will now scarcely carry him through his freshman year. We also hear that "I want to be a surgeon, because surgery accomplished positive results." This is very true also, and it is evident that if you amputate a leg your patient will be minus a member. Don't lose sight of another fact, however, that if without being competent to meet any unforeseen emergency that may arise, you lightly open the abdominal cavity, you will have a positive result in the shape of your own little private graveyard. The newly graduated surgeon is not as dangerous as the man who left medical school years ago, before the students received one-third of the surgical training that they do now. Many of these men have not taken a post-graduate course, have never been associated with a hospital, nor have they had even an opportunity for moderate surgical observation; and yet they are attempting to do the work that only a skilled specialist should undertake. I am not speaking of emergency surgery for which any man should try to prepare himself, and be brave enough to undertake when human life is at stake. I am referring to operations of election when the services of a competent man can be secured. The point is just this, gentlemen, that medicine as a science is the result of evolution and not the creation of some brilliant brain; that what has been done in it has been accomplished not so much by inspiration as by close plodding work, exhaustive experiment and continual observation; that surgery as one of its branches cannot be mastered in the four years of student life, but that to be surgeons you must be workers and observers. It will not do to settle the matter by saying that a man must make a start. This truth is too self-evident to be smart, nor is it entirely convincing. An answer equally true will be that you will not allow the embryo surgeon to start on you, and before you put yourself or your wife or your mother in his hands you will demand that he possess some other qualification for his specialty besides his conceit, his gall and his need of the fee. There may be some exceptions where the man is born and not made, but I beg to assure you that the surgeon rarely springs full-fledged and fully fitted from the brain of Minerva.