Download or read book A Narrative of Medicine in America written by James Gregory Mumford and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XVII. SOME TENDENCIES IN MODERN MEDICINE. Before concluding this retrospect of medicine and its professors as they have been in the America of our ancestors, it may be interesting to readers--especially to readers belonging to that large class felicitously called laymen--to glance at one or two of the tendencies of the modern doctor's life, --its pleasures, hardships, ambitions, and conditions. The first thing that strikes the student of medical history is not so much the great advance in knowledge among our leading men, compared with the best knowledge of the past, but the gradual levelling up of the masses of the profession and the sanity of their outlook on the problems of the doctor's life. This levelling up was not the immediate result of the great discoveries and teaching of the past. We have seen how most of the American contemporaries of Sydenham, and the Hunters, of Bichat and Haller, remained in a state of blindness. The general improvement has grown out of the fact that we have gradually come to apply to our medical teaching, as to our teaching in all other lines of endeavor, the American principles of higher education; the meeting the demands of our masses by giving them of our best. In view of the backwardness of American medical education up to a few years ago, such a statement may sound paradoxical. We had been forever comparing our darkness with the enlightenment of the great European centres, and telling of our own ignorance. But such telling and such comparing bore their fruit. We kept looking at the best things among those foreign folk, and crying out that we should lead up to them not our chosen few, but our rank and file. We have never been contented with looking at the state of that European rank and file, .