I envied my three friends not a little when I found they graduated with full marks and high honors. However, the desired diploma of “M.D.” was also awarded to me. I felt grateful for it, intending to make the most conscientious use of the power thus given to me and which I felt I fully deserved, as I could not help judging my medical knowledge to be as complete as that of any one of the forty-two graduates.
And it is for this reason, also, that I condemn the method of judging of the ability or competence of any student simply from questions and answers. So much knowledge can be acquired by storing the memory with all sorts of details, without making one’s self fit to digest what is learned and to assimilate even a part of it. But how necessary is this latter when one is called upon to help all sorts of conditions in people who seek advice for physical, mental or moral ailments. And a physician, in the full sense of the word, must be qualified to help human nature from these three points of view. The mere studying and learning by heart of the symptoms of diseases, and of the origin, preparation and doses of drugs, ought to be the last chapter to be examined upon.
My private studies in which examinations would have given much more satisfactory results, were “biology,” “cellular anatomy” and “comparative anatomy,” in none of which subjects had we any instruction in the college. And it is my opinion that the medical profession will not, and cannot, make medicine a science as long as these branches (in both their physiological and pathological forms) are not studied profoundly and made a foundation upon which to build methods for averting or controlling disease. So long as physicians are taught to talk of “curing disease,” so long will the whole profession wander in the realm of empiricism, if not outright quackery.
It may be excusable that I thus use myself in illustrating what I think is so pernicious, namely, cramming the memory with learning isolated facts and filling the brain to its fullest capacity with the names of authors and their opinions, leaving no room for individual reasoning or research or for the power of making original deductions and applications.
After this apparent digression, I must return to my theme, namely, the last few weeks of my student life in Cleveland. As I have already stated how distrustful the so-called “good society” was concerning female medical students and how ready the so-called “reformers” were to seek them, I must here mention a peculiar aberration which had taken hold of the whole community. I refer to what was then called Mesmerism. The individual thinking and theorizing on this subject assumed with many persons a perfectly preposterous form. The views held were based on no scientific research or study but simply on memorizing what was published (often after the most superficial observation) regarding hysterical or somnambulistic manifestations.
The faith with which statements of so-called “cures” in all sorts of illnesses were received was just as widespread as that which later accepted Clairvoyance, Hypnotism and Christian Science. These, one after the other, followed the Mesmerism and Magnetism waves; but they are all precisely the same thing, under other names, and they are all more or less influenced by what is called Spiritualism. And the countless “miracle” workers, under a host of names, are all of the same class.
The desire for the assistance of superrational influences is one of the greatest obstacles which the human mind has to overcome. It will take centuries of education before the majority of thinking beings will learn that a cell will produce only its like, that modifications of the cell are produced only after a time of slow and, as yet, imperceptible changes, and not suddenly by prayer or personal magnetism.
One of the most perplexing phenomena which I observed was that educated men themselves became victims of these delusions. For instance, I knew a professor of botany who was so completely absorbed in the phenomena of Spiritualism and Magnetism that he submitted himself to treatment by these uneducated pretenders for an ailment produced by malaria. It is sometimes almost discouraging to see that even education will not prevent faith in the superrational or supernatural.
But the Earth has billions and billions of years to live, and at the rate of mental development as we have observed it, I have no doubt that the human intellect will grow out of its present infantile condition into a maturity of which even the present generations have no conception, although, unconsciously, we all assist in nursing the embryo of intelligence which we call “knowledge” and “science.”
One may dream of the greatness of the human mind when all the inhabitants of the earth will be as well-developed mentally as the few out of the billions are to-day. One may imagine that the lowest of the Pygmies in mid-Africa or the stupidest Esquimaux near the North Pole will be able to think, to reason and to enjoy, as much as I do now; and that the then great minds will work and struggle to bring up in the scale such poor ignorant mortals as those of my present level, these then existing by the billions as we have the billions of illiterate existing to-day.