MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES. In the colonies until about the middle of the 18th century there was no formal medical teaching. The apprentice system prevailed and young men took service with a physician and after some years went Into practice for themselves. Usually this was not far from their preceptor and they could recur to him for consultation. Sons of the better-to-do colonists desirous of studying medi cine crossed to Europe and received the ad vantage of medical training in Edinburgh, London, Paris or the Netherlands. Consider ing the long, difficult, dangerous voyage, the surprise is how many young Colonials secured a European medical education. Manifestly medicine was taken very seriously. The pre liminary education was excellent and the medical training thoroh. Dr. Morton of Pennsylvania Hospital)) does not hesitate to say: We find that the professional men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally much better educated than most of their successors of the present time. Almost without exception they were classical scholars, their graduating theses must be written in Latin?) The ideals in medical education were high. Dr. Thomas Bond's essay on (The Utility of Clinical Lectures' (Philadelphia 1766) insists that the student °must Join Examples with he can be sufficiently qualified to prescribe for the sick, for Language and Books alone can never give him Adequate Ideas of Diseases and the best methods of Treating them? bond argued that clinical teaching was absolutely necessary and even suggested that the teaching should be by what we call the ward class method with questions to bring out the knowledge of the disease and parts affected. He even recognized and proclaimed that the only policy that would lead to real advance in medicine was to follow up clinical observation in fatal cases by a post mortem and acknowledge mistakes in the hope to be able to avoid them in other cases. His words deserve to be pub licly posted in every hospital and medical school of the country. (gIf the Disease baffles the power of Art and the Patient falls a Sacrifice to it, he then brings his Knowledge to the Test, and fixes Honour or discredit on his Reputation by exposing all the Morbid parts to View, and Demonstrates by what means it produced Death, and if perchance he finds something unexpected, which Betrays an Error in Judgment, he like a great and good man immediately acknowl edges the mistake, and, for the benefit of sur vivors, points out other methods by which it might have been more happily treated" About 1750 there are indications of waking up to the need of formal medical teaching.
William Hunter, a relative of John Hunter of London in Rhode Island, Cadwalader in Phila delphia, and John Bard and Peter Middleton in New York did some anatomical teaching with dissections in this decade. In 1762 Dr. William Shippen, Jr., recently returned from London and Edinburgh, commenced a course of anatomical lectures with dissections at his father's residence in Philadelphia and this was attended by 12 students. This led to the organization of our first medical school as the Medical Department of the Philadelphia College in 1765. Shipper's principal auxiliary was Dr. John Morgan, who had been with him in London and Edinburgh, where they agreed to found a medical school in America. The second medical school was the Medical Department of King's College, New York, established in 176& New York antici pated Philadelphia in the giving of the degree of Doctor in Medicine, the first being conferred on Robert Tucker in 1770. Philadelphia gave the first Bachelor in Medicine in 1768ut did M not confer its first degree of Doctor in Medicine until June 1771. Though medical teaching had not been organized physicians abounded. It was calculated just before the Revolution that there were some 3,500 physicians practising in the Colonies, of whom less than 400 had degrees. New York City, containing about 10,000 inhabit ants, °could boast of more than forty gentlemen of the faculty, the greatest part of whom were mere pretenders to a profession of which they were entirely ignorant? (Independent Re flector, New York 1753).