subject, and yet not to infringe upon the proper and desirable freedom of action of the several Professors. We have desired to avoid on the one hand a scheme so restricted as to be inefficient, and on the other hand one so extensive as to be beyond our means and formidable to students. We have been solicitous to adopt a just medium, and to present a plan respectable in the number of its Professors and the term of study and lectures required, and capable of taking position at once in presence of any and all competition. We trust that the basis we present may be sufficient to secure its object. But without presenting elaborately the reasons which have led your Committee to the results they have come to, they would simply add that, guided in part by the experience of other schools, in part by circumstances peculiar to our own University, and in part by our own reflections, we beg leave to present the following prositions as an outline of a Law Department for the University of Michigan, and recommend its adoption:

I. A Law Department shall be and is hereby established in the University, to go into operation on the first of October next.

II. It shall consist at least of three Professorships.

1. A Professorship of Common and Statute Law.

2. A Professorship of Pleading, Practice and Evidence.

3. A Professorship of Equity, Jurisprudence, Pleading and Practice.

III. The general subjects of International, Maritime, Civil, Commercial; and Criminal Laws, Medical Jurisprudence, the Jurisprudence of the United States and other branches of law, shall be assigned to the several Professors as may be hereafter determined.

IV. A system of Lectures, Study, Practice, and Examinations shall be pursued in the Law Department, and shall extend through a period of two years; the term each year commencing on the first of October, and continuing until the last Wednesday of March ensuing.

V. There shall be at least ten Lectures and Examinations each week during the entire course.

VI. Moot Courts shall be organized, and such other measures adopted by the Law Faculty as may most effectually promote the practical knowledge and application of the principles taught.

VII. The Law Faculty shall device and recommend a course of study and exercises in detail to be pursued by students during the entire course and submit the same to the Board of Regents; and they shall also submit such modifications of the same from time to time as they may deem expedient. The course shall be so arranged, as far as may be, that students may begin with any term.

VIII. To entitle an applicant to admission in the Law Department, he shall

1

present to the President satisfactory evidence of good moral character, and shall pay the usual matriculation and incidental fees.

IX. The degree of Bachelor of Laws shall be conferred upon those who shall pursue the full course of two years, pass an approved examination, and be recommended by the Law Faculty.

X. That degree shall also be conferred upon those who shall have attended other law schools for a period equal to one year of our course, or shall have practiced law one year under a license from the highest court of general jurisdiction in any State, and shall have also pursued the second year's course in the Law Department of our University, and shall pass an approved examination, and be recommended by the Law Faculty.

XI. It shall be the duty of the Professor of Common and Statute Law to deliver Lectures on Law before the Senior Class during their last term; and students in the Law Department shall have the privileges of the Library and Museum, and be permitted to attend Lectures in any Department without additional charge.

Your Committee have thus presented for the consideration of the Board an outline of the proposed Law Department, to be filled up from the suggestions of experience. With our present income we must sustain our three Departments, or rather including that lately resolved on of Civil Engineering, our four Departments, with their respective Faculties.

To accomplish this, giving just and due development to cach Departmentnourishing all-indulging favoritism toward neither at the expense of any other-keeping our buildings in repair and adding to them as exigencies may require, guarding our cabinet and our apparatus from deterioration, increasing slowly though surely our Library, and supplying all needful incidentals-will evidently require the practical application of all the prudence, all the administrative skill, all the vigilance and all the energy of the Board. Our duty will be well performed by nothing less. Our constituents can require of us nothing

more.

All which is respectfully submitted.

J. EASTMAN JOHNSON, Chairman,

D. MCINTYRE,

B. L. BAXTER.

March 29, 1859.

ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CLINICAL COURSE.

The Committee on the Medical Department to whom was referred the resolution of the Board requiring them to inquire and report upon the expediency of establishing a Clinical Course in that Department, beg leave to report:

The utility of clinical instruction, either in the wards of a hospital or at the domestic sick-bed, to the formation of a well-instructed and accomplished practitioner of medicine and surgery, is too obvious to admit of controversy.

The successful practice of the healing art involves not only a knowledge of its abstract and speculative principles-of the structure and organization of the human frame, of the theory of disease, and of all that can be communicated upon the difficult and exhaustless subject in all its departments by books and by oral instruction, but also that skill and dexterity, that power to perceive, to know, to discriminate, which can only be acquired by experience and observation at the bedside of the patient. the good physician must possess not only the science, but the art of medicine.

Where and under what conditions this art, this indispensable facility can best be acquired, your Committee, while they suppose medical men to differ upon the subject, have of themselves no competency to determine. They could only appeal to and collate and compare the recorded opinions of competent professional men and instructors, which, if it were the duty of your Committee to decide these questions, it would be incumbent upon them to do.

But it appears to your Committee that neither the hospital nor the domestic sick-bed is necessarily, is even appropriately, an attachment to the University. We think that the University may properly confine itself to didactic instruction, availing itself of such means of illustration as may incidentally fall within

its reach. The necessity of real, living experience to the accomplished practitioner, is 'common to many sciences-to what does it not belong?-besides that of medicine. Our Bachelors of Science would hardly be deemed competent to take charge of the Coast Survey, or the construct.on of a great and expensive railroad, or to spau the huge chasm with a fabric of gossamer, over which the mighty engine with its loaded train shall pass in safety, without, at least, some experience in a subordinate position, in the oper and actual field of practice, even though endorsed by our additional degree of Civil Engineer. Yet we do not attempt to connect the Coast Survey, nor the new railroad in process of construction, nor any other of the great works that are actually in progress in the country, with the University:-not more because it is impracticable than because the instruction there obtained, however valuable, would constitute no part of the course in this University: to call it so would be a solecism. So, when our Bachelors of Law shall go forth to the forums of public justice, parchment in hand, they will hardly find it a passport to fat fees and distinguished success, till attrition with legal and worldly realities shall have so polished them that they shall have an electric attraction for the one, and a fitness to slide smoothly into the other. Yet we do not go into the court to instruct or guide, because the court is not the theater of the University.

Is the degree, then valueless? Is it a falsehood? Not at all. It is to be taken, however, for what it is-a certificate that the graduate is versed in the theory and principles of the science-that he is prepared and qualified, by all the instruction which the University gives its students; to enter upon the still more arduous task of perfecting himself in it by the application of those principles to actual practice: if not safely at the head of great undertakings, or in charge of great interests, or of human life; then subordinately or still as students, in the great world of actual business and disease. The University does not go with them to aid in the practice;-it appears to your Committee that the University need not attempt to bring the public business or the hospital to its doors as an adjunct in its duties of instruction. Your Committee would not be misunderstood as undervaluing the importance of clinical instruction to the student of medicine, but simply as asserting that the clinical school pertains to the hospital rather than to the University. The University is separate, entire independent. A public hospital is not a part of it; is not subject to its control; is a place where you go by sufferance, not by authority.

So much your Committee have thought proper to say upon general principles. If these views are correct, then, of the practical difficulties in the way of establishing a clinical course, it is hardly necessary to speak. If they are not correct, the difficulties are obvious. We will waive the financial question, and rest in the fact that you have no foundation for such a course. In this eity your Committee suppose there is not, nor will be for many years, any in

stitution that would furnish materiel sufficient to render a course interesting or profitable.

The attendance of students at a hospital in Detroit, whether of the Sisters of Charity or other, your Committee think cannot justly be considered as any part of a course in the University of Michigan, even if the physician and instructor in attendance receive a salary from your treasury.

With these views your committee are of opinion that it is inexpedient to establish a clinical course in the Medical Department.

All which is respectfully submitted.

E. L. BROWN, Chairman,

J. EASTMAN JOHNSON,
O. L. SPAULDING.

[NOTE. In appending our signatures to the above report, we design to express our assent to the conclusion at which the Chairman has arrived, in the present condition of the University funds; while reserving any views leading to such conclusion.

J. EASTMAN JOHNSON,

O. L. SPAULDING.]