IX. MEDICAL TEACHING AND PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS.
At all times in the history of education, the standards of scientific education, and the institutions of learning, can be best judged from the condition of the medical schools. When the medical sciences are taken seriously, when thorough preparation is demanded before their study may be taken up, when four or five years of attention to theoretic and practical medicine are required for graduation, and when the professors are writing textbooks that are to attract attention for generations afterwards, then, there is always a thoroughly scientific temper m the university itself. Medicine is likely to suffer, first, whenever there is neglect of science. The studies of the German historians, Puschmann, Pagel, Neuberger, and Sudhoff in recent years, have made it very clear that the medical schools of the universities of the Thirteenth Century were maintaining high standards. The republication of old texts, especially in France, has called attention to the magnificent publications of their professors, while a review of their laws and regulations confirms the idea of the good work that was being done. Gurlt, in his history of surgery, "Geschichte der Chirurgie" (Berlin, 1898), has reviewed the textbooks of Roger and Roland and the Four Masters, of William of Salicet and Lanfranc and of many others, in a way to make it very clear that these men were excellent teachers.
When we discover that three years of preparatory university work was required before the study of medicine could be begun, and four years of medical studies were required, with a subsequent year of practice under a physician's direction, before a license for independent practice could be issued, then the scientific character of the medical schools and therefore of the universities to which they were attached is placed beyond all doubt. These are the terms of the law issued by the Emperor Frederick II. for the Two Sicilies. That, in substance, it applied to other countries we learn from the fact that the charters of medical schools granted by the Popes at this time require proper university preliminary studies, and four or five years at medicine before the degree of Doctor could be given. We know besides that in the cities only those who were graduates of properly recognized medical schools were allowed to practice medicine, so that there was every encouragement for the maintenance of professional standards. Indeed, [{442}] strange as it may seem to our generation, the standards of the Thirteenth Century in medical education were much higher than our own, and their medical schools were doing fine work.