[Footnote 24: For sketch of Chauliac see Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1909, or Catholic Churchmen in Science, second series. Dolphin Press, Philadelphia, 1909.]
The old-time medical traditions of education which in the mediaeval universities produced such men as William of Salicet and Lanfranc and Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac, persisted during the next two centuries in the southern countries of Europe, and then were transferred to America through Spain. The first American medical school was not, as has so often been said, at my own Alma Mater, the University of [{371}] Pennsylvania, which had its first lectures in 1767, while the Physicians and Surgeons of New York did not come for some ten years later and Harvard only in the following decade, but in the medical school of the University of Mexico, where the first lectures were held in 1578, and where a full medical school was organized before the end of the sixteenth century. In this medical school, which during the seventeenth century came to have several hundred students, the university tradition of the olden time was well preserved. Three years of preliminary study at the university were required before a student could take up the course in medicine, and four years of medical study were required before graduation. We have some of the text-books, and know much about the curriculum of this old medical school, and in every way it is worthy of the old university traditions.
Unfortunately our universities in what is now the United States developed very slowly. King's College (Columbia) did not become a university in the sense of having law and medical schools as well as an undergraduate department until the nineteenth century had almost begun. Harvard did not have a law school affiliated with it until the first quarter of the nineteenth century had almost run its course. The affiliations between the medical schools and the universities in these cases was only very slight, and the medical schools were entirely in the hands of the [{372}] medical faculty, whose main purpose during a great part of the nineteenth century was to make medical studies as short as possible and as inexpensive as they could possibly be made for the faculty, because that left so much more of the fees to be absorbed by the historic septennate of professors who ruled and managed the university. The consequence was that during most of the nineteenth century two terms of four months each were all that was required for the diploma in medicine in most American medical schools. Three schools maintained a very high standard by requiring twenty weeks in each of two calendar years. The medical school that was considered one of the best in the country, and whose graduates obtained the highest marks in the army and navy examinations, that of the University of Virginia, required but two terms of four and one-half months each which might be taken in the same calendar year, and then gave the doctor's degree.
It may be as well to say that the doctor's degree or diploma was a license to practise. There were no State regulations for the practice of medicine, and no matter how obtained, a diploma allowed practise. As some one has well said the diploma, then, was a license to practise, not medicine, the Lord knows! but to practise on one's patients until one had learned some medicine. It is out of this slough of despond in medical education that we have climbed in the last thirty-five years. We are getting back to the [{373}] old-time university traditions. Let us hope that we shall not allow ourselves to get away from them again. There are ups and downs in medical practice and medical fashions and medical education, and all depends on the men who compose the profession at any one time and not on any mythical progress that holds them up and compels them to do better than those who went before them. The highest compliment that can be paid to American medicine and medical men is that, in spite of this handicap of education they did not utterly degenerate, but, on the contrary, somehow managed to maintain the dignity of the profession and do much good work.
It is to you to-day, entering on this profession, that we look to do your share in keeping up the dignity of the medical profession and in maintaining standards in medical education. We have a glorious tradition of 6,000 years behind us with the great men of the profession worshipped as gods at the beginning, because men thought so much of them, and remembered fondly as great masters when they came in the after-time. From I-em-Hetep through AEsculapius and Hippocrates and Galen and Guy de Chauliac and Sydenham and Boerhaave down to our own time, the men whom we delight to honor are the ones who did not work with an eye single to their own success, but who tried, above all, to do things for humanity and for the profession to which they belonged. The man who is successful as a [{374}] money-maker in his profession is only doing half his duty. He must make medicine as well as money, that is, he must by his observations help others to recognize and treat disease better than they did before; he must labor for the benefit of humanity, and, above all, he must see that there are no decadence of professional spirit and no deterioration of medical education as far as his influence can go. It is men of this kind that we hope to send forth from Fordham, and you stand in the van of them all, and I wish you God-speed.
UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOLS
"Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers."
--Tennyson, Locksley Hall.
"The foundation stones of the whole modern structure of human wisdom have all been laid by the architects of yesterday. Thrice wise is he who knows the quarries and builders of by-gone ages and is able to differentiate the stones which have been rejected from those which have been utilized."
--Anon.
"Ideo Medico id in primis curandum, ut ab aegro circumstantias omnes accurate intelligat, intellectas consideret, ut inter curandum media illa adhibeat, quae tollendo morbo apta sunt, ne ex medicina nocumentum proveniat." --Basil Valentine, Triumphal Chariot of Antimony.
[The physician must therefore especially take care that he understand all the circumstances of his patient very clearly, and after understanding them weigh them well, so that during his treatment he may use those means which are especially suited to control the disease, lest any harm should come from his medicine.]