Whither Medicine

THF title of this talk is "Whither Medicine,"-which means of course that, at aniv rate for part of this address, I intend to trv and examine the changes that mav come about in our profession, and more still those changes which we should try to produce. The future does not just happen; it is made by our own efforts, or lack of them, now in the present; and what we do now depends on what has gone before, what we believe, what we have learnt, and what experiences we have had. MEDICAL EDUCATION. Let us start these conjectures of the future with a look at medical education. You, of course, are seeing it at very close quarters at present. Although this is called the Opening Address, at which I am supposed to welcome you to the clinical part of the Medical School, most of vou have already been here for several months and have had a very fair sample of the teaching of clinical medicine. So you will be able to criticize, at first hand, what I am going to tell you. Your judgment will mature as the years bring your education into perspective. I do not, of course, mean to say that you must not criticize now. It would be quite useless even if I did say so. I am sure vou will agree that the most important thing in medical education, as in any education, is that vou, the student, must do the learning. You must read the books, and especially in clinical medicine you must see the phenomena of disease and try to understand them, at the bedside, in the X-ray Department, in the Department of Pathology, or anywhere else where you ineet them. It is your own initiative; and your owil keenness; and your owIn energy which will bring you to the intellectual and geographical point at which you can learn, rather than any passive absorption of teaching from others. Your teachers, as it were, can take the horse to the water but it is you that have to do the drinking. And I am sure you will find, if vou have not already done so, that very often you have to find water for yourselves. Indeed I think some of the thrills in the learning of medicine is the finding out of things for yourself and later on reading in the textbooks that somebodv else …