MEDICAL EDUCATION. The earliest in stitutions for the teaching of medicine were situat ed in temples and groves dedicated to the worship of the deities who were supposed to preside over the health of their worshipers. Thus in Egypt the god Osiris and his wife Isis were the tutelary deities of the medical arts, and in Greece the god of health was -Esculapius. The temples were situated in the neighborhood usually of streams and springs which were supposed to possess healing properties. One of the most famous of these ancient temples was that sit uated on the island of Cos; its most celebrated disciple was Hippocrates, who flourished early in the fourth century B.C., and whose teachings ruled medical science even to the close of the eighteenth century. Throughout Italy the same methods prevailed, the Romans, deriving most of their medical lore from Greek teachers. Thus Galen was a native of Pergamum, where there was a famous medical school in which he was edueated. His great work as a teacher, however, was done in Borne. Greek teachers were also responsible for the rise of the Arabian school of medicine. In the sixth century A.D. the Nestorians, being driven out of Syria because of their heretical opinions, settled largely among the Arabs, and transmitted to them their medical knowledge. By this time the teacher of medicine was practically divorced from his religious functions, although even down to the mediaeval period much of tire medical learning of the world appertained to the priesthood.
Until the time of the Renaissance the teaching of medicine in the mediaeval medical schools consisted almost solely in dissertations and lec tures upon the writings of Hippocrates and Galen. The dissection of the human body only intermittently practiced. In 1315 Mondino dissected in Bologna the cadavers of two women. Master Albert, a lecturer in the same institution, dissected. in 1319, a body stolen from the ceme tery by the students. Bertueci and Pietro de Angela, a little later, made systematie dissee lions. But an the whole, anatoinieal science had made little advance.
Clinical teaching was on no better basis. The only way in which the student received bedside instruction was through apprenticing himself to some practitioner and aceompanying him on his rounds. or by acting as his servant and as sistant. Although the _teat universities con ferred degrees in course, there were. nevertheless.
enormous numbers of quacks and charlatans who flourished in the absence of any efficient laws regulating the right of persons to practice the healing art.
In the Age: the most famous of all the medical schools was that of Salerno. near Naples. Which W;11‘.: organized in connection with a monastery of Bentslietine monks. Its grad uates here 1.?) be found teaching ill all quarters of the globe, and its influence was widespread, not only at the period in which it flourished, but for many years subsequent. Another cele brated medical school was that of Alontpel lier, in Prance. The Cuiver,ity of Paris was founded in 12(15 and graduated enormous classes. Its graduates were held ill high esteem. They were not. allowed to practice .surgcry. and held practitioners of that art in the greatest con tempt. France, however, was the pioneer in recognizing the necessity for a higher education of surgeons, and for their elevation to a rank cor responding to that of physicians. lm surgical teaching the French were always greatly in ad vance of other nations. It was in the Univer sity of Paris, likewise, that midwifery was first taught to classes of male students.
Among the most famous centres for medical teaching in the sixteenth cent my were the schools of Bologna, Padua, and Pisa in Italy. .At the present time Italian physicians are doing an enormous amount. of seientilie research work. The facilities offered to students in their medical colleges, however, arc not to be compared with those afforded by the other Continental medical schools. In Germany there were numbers of universities with flourishilig medical depart Melds at a very early period. among may he mentioned Erfurt. Wittenberg, and Vienna. With the nineteenth century :1 new era dawned in German medicine. To it more than to ow: other single nation is due the credit of the wonderful achievements of the present day medi cine. Virelmw, lc.och, and the other distinguished occupants of professorial chairs have had in their classes and laboratories eager students Trout all over the world. A more general educa tion and a larger aequaintance with the various branches of the natural sciences are required of the German medical student than is cus tomary elsewhere; a term of five years is re quisite to obtain the degree of 51,1).