If we examine any lecturer's style, and ask ourselves what is his fault, we shall find very few in whom we cannot detect one or more. When we do this, and then reflect on Abernethy, we are astonished to find how many he avoided. We shall endeavour to make this as intelligible as we can, by citing some of the points which our attention to different lecturers have suggested.
"Simplicity" has struck us as a feature which, in some sense or other, is very commonly defective. Simplicity appears so important, that perhaps, by not a very illegitimate extension of its meaning, it might be made to include almost all the requisitions of this mode of teaching. Let us think of it in relation to language and illustration. In all sciences, the facts are simple; the laws are yet more so; increasing knowledge tends to impress on us an ever-increasing and comprehensive simplicity. In explaining simple things, no doubt language should be simple too. If we employ language unnecessarily technical, we use symbols to which the learner is unaccustomed. He has not to learn the facts only; but he has the additional labour of something allied to learning it in a foreign language. The unnecessary use of technicalities should then surely be avoided. Abernethy was obliged to use them, because there were often no other terms; but he always avoided any needless multiplication of them. When they were difficult or objectionable, he tried some manœuvre to lighten the repulsiveness of them.
There are many muscles in the neck with long names, and which are generally given with important parts of surgical anatomy. Here he used to chat a little; he called them the little muscles with the long names; but he would add, that, after all, they were the best-named muscles in the body, because their names expressed their attachments. This gave him an excuse for referring to what he had just described, in the form of a narrative, rather than a dry repetition. Then, with regard to one muscle, that he wished particularly to impress, the name of which was longer than any of the others, he used to point it out as a striking feature in all statues; and then, repeating its attachments, and pointing to the sites which they occupied, say it was impossible to do so without having the image of the muscle before us.
In other parts of the Lectures, he would accompany the technical name by the popular one. Thus he would speak of the pancreas, or sweetbread; cartilage, or gristle. Few people are aware how many difficulties are smoothed by such simple manœuvres. Nothing interests people so much as giving anything positive. We think it not improbable that many a man has heard a lecture, in which animals have been described with whose habits he had been perfectly familiar, without having recognized his familiar acquaintances in the disguise afforded by a voluminous Greek compound. Abernethy seemed always to lecture, not so much as if he was telling us what he knew, as that which we did not know. There was an absence of all display of any kind whatever.
To hear some lecturers, one would almost think that they adopted the definition of language which is reported of Talleyrand—that it was intended to conceal our ideas. Some make simple things very much otherwise by the mode of explaining them. This reminds us of a very worthy country clergyman, in the west of England, who, happening to illustrate something in his sermon by reference to the qualities of pitch, thought he should help his rustic congregation by enlarging a little on the qualities of that mineral. He accordingly commenced by saying, "Now, dear brethren, pitch is a bituminous substance:" rather a difficult beginning, we should think, to have brought to a successful conclusion.
Sometimes we have heard a very unnecessary catalogue of technicalities joined with several propositions in one sentence. It is hardly to be imagined how this increases the difficulty to a beginner; whilst it impresses the excellence of that simplicity and clearness which were so charming in Abernethy. We give an example of this defect. The lecturer is describing the continuation of the cuticle over the eyes of the crustacea, as lobsters, &c.: "The epidermis (the cuticle) in the compound eyes of the crustacea passes transparent and homogeneous over the external surface of the thick layer of the prismatic corneæ, which are here, as in insects, generally hexagonal, but sometimes quadrangular; and to the internal ends of the prismatic corneæ are applied the broad bases of the hard, tapering, transparent lenses, which have their internal truncated apices directed to the retinal expansions of the numerous optic nerves."
The high respect we entertain for the lecturer here alluded to, withholds us from attempting to supply a more homely version of the foregoing passage. But what an idea this must give to a student who reads it in "the outlines" of a science of which he is about to commence the study. There is nothing whatever difficult in the ideas themselves; but what a bristling chevaux-de-frise of hard words, what a phalanx of propositions! We fear we should never arrive at the knowledge of many of those beautiful adaptations which all animals exemplify, if we had to approach them by such a forbidding pathway.
As contrasted with simple facts thus obscured by an unnecessary complexity of expression, we may see in Abernethy how a very comprehensive proposition may be very simply expressed. Take almost the first sentence in his Surgical Lectures, the germ, as it were, of a new science: "Now I say that local disease, injury, or irritation, may affect the whole system; and conversely, that disturbance of the whole system may affect any part."
We have sometimes thought that lecturers who have had several desirable qualifications have materially diminished the attraction of them by faults which we hardly know how to designate by a better term than vulgarity, ill-breeding, or gaucherie. Now Abernethy had, in the first place, that most difficult thing to acquire, the appearance of perfect ease, without the slightest presumption. Some lecturers appear painfully "in company;" others have a self-complacent assurance, that conveys an unfavourable impression to most well-bred people. Abernethy had a calm, quiet sort of ease, with that expression of thought which betokened respect for his task and his audience, with just enough of effort only, to show that his mind was in his business.
He had no offensive tricks. We have known lecturers who never began without making faces; others who intersperse the lecture with unseemly gesticulations. Some, on the most trivial occasion, as referring to a diagram, are constantly turning their backs completely to the audience. This is, we know, disagreeable to many people, and, unless a lecturer is very clear and articulate, occasionally renders his words not distinctly audible. Even in explaining diagrams, it is seldom necessary to turn quite round; the smallest inclination towards the audience satisfies the requisitions of good breeding, reminds them agreeably of a respect with which they never fail to be pleased, and of the lecturer's self-possession.