“I know, dear. But St. Bernard’s having made your papa’s fame and fortune, isn’t it rather a shame to upset the concern?”
“I have no desire to upset anything. Don’t you remember how we rebuilt our parish church at Welby, without stopping the services for a single day? That is what I want to do in this case.”
“I don’t quite follow you, dear.”
“Well, of course I haven’t formed any complete scheme yet; but I have often thought that what we want in London, for instance, is a sort of Hospital University, with a great number of affiliated colleges of healing. Not a great unwieldy Cathedral of Surgery as they call it, here and there, but a ‘Chapel of Ease’ at every sufferer’s door. Fifty beds should be the limit, I think.”
“Not enough. Don’t you know the examining bodies do not recognise as a teaching hospital one with less than two hundred beds?”
“But I am concerned with healing the sick, not with teaching students.”
“Just so; but where are your future doctors to come from if you cut off their only way of learning their business?”
“Do you really believe the present system is the only way of training medical men and medical women, for I recognise the right and advantage of women students?”
“Your papa has often told me that a doctor can only be liberally educated by being enabled to draw his conclusions from a great number of facts; and, as each case has some peculiar feature, the more cases he sees, even of the same disease, the more the intelligent pupil will learn.”
“I see the force of that,” replied Mildred, “but I think my scheme would meet it. I would make use of the great pauper infirmaries, at present entirely wasted, as schools of medicine.”