In Law and Medicine, fewer changes have been made. In the former, a barrister was not allowed to make a friend of an attorney, or to take his hand, or to visit at his house. The low class attorney-at-law, of whom there were a great many, practised with impunity all kinds of iniquities and conspiracies; he was, indeed, an enemy to the human race; he was usurer; he was the concoctor of civil actions, which he dragged on interminably;—it was he who filled the prisons with unfortunate prisoners; he robbed the widow and defrauded the fatherless; he took advantage of difficulties which he aggravated—he charged what he pleased. The power of the attorney—now called solicitor—for mischief is very greatly curtailed;—a taxing master looks after his bills; he can no longer clap a debtor into prison; he is liable to be struck off the rolls for misconduct.
In Medicine the physician never claimed so great a superiority over the surgeon. If he did, that superiority has vanished. Great are the recent triumphs of surgery: not so great, perhaps, those of medicine. In those days the surgeon operated in the presence of the physician; he did not aspire to the medical degree; he could not be called “Doctor.” There were no anæsthetics in those days; operations of all kinds were limited by the patient’s power of endurance: a long operation killed, because there is a limit to the endurance of pain. The discoveries of the laboratory have placed the treatment of all disease on a new and more scientific footing. Fortunately, I am not called upon in this place to do more than indicate changes that only a medical student could properly explain. We can, however, all understand the ward, clean and neat, with regulated temperature; the patients under the care of bright and cheerful nurses; the hospitals “walked” not by the young ruffians of the “Bob Sawyer” type, but keen and eager students, with whom science is more than a mere profession, and the causes of diseases more than their cure.
OSBORNE HOUSE, ISLE OF WIGHT
Sixty years ago, I said, there were only three professions. How many are there now, recognised as on an equal footing of dignity and importance with these three?
Formerly, Architecture was not considered a profession. I remember long ago, in the Sixties, listening to a group of men who were discussing whether architecture had any claims at all to be a profession—certainly the local architect was also the house-agent—and whether a gentleman could belong to it. I believe they agreed that it was only a trade.
THE ROYAL YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT”
Formerly, there was no profession of science at all. At Cambridge there were chairs of Mathematics, of Chemistry, and of other branches. But there was no profession of any branch of science. No man set up a laboratory and said “I am a chemist by profession”; there were none of the great Schools for Physical Science, such as now exist at Cambridge, at South Kensington, at Newcastle, and at other places; no young men began by “going in” for science, as they do at present. That profession which offers the noblest prizes of fame and name, together with a sufficiency of income, has been created in all its numerous branches within the last sixty years. The British Association made the world familiar with the claims and the work of the new science. Such men as Humphry Davy, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and so many others, who will be accounted the chief luminaries of this age, planted firmly the claims of science in the minds of the people, and raised the position of science to the same level as that of Latin and Greek scholarship. All these physicists, electricians, zoologists, biologists, chemists, and the rest have come into existence during the Queen’s reign. The teaching of science at our Universities and Schools, the multiplication of new Colleges in all the Colonies, as well as at home, have created places for these students and a demand for their teaching: they have also created a demand for new books, which only these teachers were able to supply.
Formerly, again, the position of teacher in a school, except when one was Headmaster of Eton, Harrow, or Winchester, was one of curious contempt. The reason for this contempt was simple: it was the connection between a schoolmaster and his floggings. That connection has now ceased. At a few schools, the Head exercises the old business with the birch: it is regarded as a custom or a usage rendered venerable by antiquity. “I was swished,” said a young fellow the other day, “nineteen times when I was at school. I have always regretted that I didn’t make it twenty.” But the assistant masters have no power of inflicting personal chastisement.