Abstract
THIS was the title of the inaugural lecture delivered on November 26 by Prof. John Ryle, the new regius professor of physic at Cambridge, and now available in attractive book-form (Cambridge University Press, 1935, 2s. net). Prof. Ryle reviews the scope and present shortcomings of medical science, and con-cludes that among the great body of practitioners and laboratory workers there is too large a proportion whose standards of accuracy are defective, and whose judgment is crippled. These shortcomings are ascribed to three primary errors: (1) faulty selection of men, or misdirection of their energies after qualification; (2) complicated and unwieldy systems of education and examination; and (3) the spread of the cult of specialism. Prof. Ryle does not condemn specialism as such, “for good specialism is essential to all scientific progress”; but condemns only excessive, premature and misdirected specialisms for the subversive influences which they have had upon medical thought, action and education. In seeking a remedy, Prof. Ryle reviews some of the recent achievements in medicine, and finds that the clinician has himself experimented, or that there has been intimate collaboration between experimenter and clinician. Observation and experiment are both essential, but they must go hand in hand. Prof. Ryle envisages that in the future the younger men will turn more frequently to the study of problems at the bedside, and that a happier partition of problems and a closer collaboration between the wards and the laboratory, between students of normal and students of morbid physiology, than obtains at present, will play their part.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Aims and Methods of Medical Science. Nature 137, 652 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137652b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137652b0