Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

ucation, or deprive them of that prominence they have heretofore had and continue to possess. Objections against their study are generally founded in ignorance of their uses and design, or the true reasons which have determined the instructors of youth for centuries in giving them such a conspicuous position. It is not the amount of information obtained from classic sources, which commends them so much for the study of youth, as it is the admirable aid the Latin and Greek languages furnish for the discipline of the mind, the development of its powers, and the formation of habits of close thought and accurate discrimination, for the cultivation of a refined taste, and for securing a better, more accurate, and thorough knowledge of our own English tongue. It is not to be denied that some of the loftiest ideas of Liberty and Patriotism are derived from the Greek and Latin poets, historians, orators and statesmen, and that the benefits of ancient civilization may thence be secured for the purpose of modern advancement. But these and other kindred advantages are only secondary compared with the value of the Greek and Latin languages, especially the latter, to the English scholar, as they are the fountain of so large a portion of our own tongue. No man can be fully at home, in the knowledge of his own English, who is not acquainted with Latin.

The experience of past ages in Europe, and of nearly two centu ries in our own country, has proved their importance and value as the means of mental drilling, and the easiest and best means of so cultivating the powers of his mind as to enable a young man easily to adapt himself to and become useful, not only in any of the learned professions, but in general for social influence in any vocation in life. It is true that there are men whose names are an honor to their country, and their age, who have been self-taught-who have struggled through all the disadvantages resulting from the want of an early education, and who, notwithstanding that they have never had a collegiate course, nor studied the Latin and Greek, have distinguished themselves, and greatly benefitted their fellows. But these are exceptions to the general rule. What would not their towering minds, rising above such disadvantages, have been, if they had but enjoyed the full benefit of a collegiate course? And what would multitudes of more moderate talent have failed to be, had they never been subjected to the college drill? They are the liberally educated minds who generally direct public sentiment, and possess the power to do so. Our legislative halls furnish abundant examples of the superiority which the liberally educated have over the uneducated, in the transaction even of the ordinary business of public bodies.

On the value and necessity of the study of the Latin and Greek classics, the Board have never entertained any doubts. In resigning their place to their successors, they feel that they would be unfaithful to themselves and to the University, did they not give their public testimony to what they believe to be essential, absolutely indispensable in a thorough course of liberal education.

Any attempt to derange the course of collegiate instruction, by a general provision for extensively introducing irregularities, by adapt

ing it rather to men of mature years than to minors, by leaving the different subjects and parts of study to the selection or choice of students, and by requiring services from the pro'essors accordingly, must prove disastrous to the University of Michigan. It will be but the signal for the commencement of collegiate institutions, under the care of different religious sects, and the sure means of destroying the confidence and attachment now felt towards the University, by the different religious denominations in our State. There is no short hand, patent road to learning; and students who are averse to a four years' course of laborious and assiduous application, under the care of competent professors, can never justly expect to become proficient in literature or science. Where so much time, however, cannot be given, as by those who may commence study after having passed their majority, or where facilities are denied for pursuing one or more branches of science, as of chemistry, mineralogy, or other of the natural sciences, and of their application to various arts, as of agriculture, mining, metallurgy, and the trades, or of the mathematics for purposes of engineering and mechanism, we feel that it is allimportant to provide them as soon as practicable. But schools for such purposes will require separate lecturers and faculties, and funds beyond what the University at present would be competent to meet. They might well be associated with or clustered around the collegiate faculty, and form part and parcel of a great system, whose various branches strictly and properly constitute the University. But as Rome was not built in a day, nor in an age, so it must be the work of time, as means and students multiply, and wisdom and experience are had, to enlarge or add to what his already been begun. To destroy or revolutionize what has been done, will only be to drive many of our own youth to other States, to waste the public funds, to postpone to a later period, if not fatally to frustrate, the best interest of education in our commonwealth. Our whole system of free schools is capable of being carried out and up to any extent for popular education, and district and union or high schools may be readily engrafted on it, affording educational advantages abundant as needed, and near to every man's door. But the collegiate system and the course of studies particularly adapted to the learned professions. for establishing which the U. S Government have endowed the University of Michigan, is as totally different and distinct from the common school, as is the appropriation of the sixteenth section in cach township, from the seventy-two sections made for specific purposes. The Board have ever felt it their duty to guard the funds put at their disposal, and to use them in accordance with the design had by the U. S. in the endowment of the University of Michigan."

The failure of the University to arrest the public attention, by the display of numbers in its annual catalogue, is owing to extrinsie causes, and not to any inherent defect in its organization. or want of talent in its Faculty. There is yet a lamentable deficiency in the number of preparatory schools in the State, and notwithstanding this

deficiency the ratio of college students to the population of the State is equal to that of any other State of similar age, and the institution itself is as prosperous as any other in the country, its equal in age and surrounding circumstances.

By an examination of the catalogues of the various medical schools in the surrounding States, it was ascertained that in 1848, from seventy to eighty students of medicine, citizens of Michigan, were attending lectures out of the State, and it was estimated that an equal number were reading in the offices of physicians at home. These statistics induced the Board to commence the erection of a laboratory, which should be spacious enough to afford the requisite accommodation for the medical department. In doing this, they found it necessary to expend more than their current income, both in '49 and '50. By doing this, they were enabled, having appointed a medical faculty, to open that department for the admission of students in October, A catalogue of that faculty and the regulations of the depart

ment, are hereto annexed.

In an age elated by its notions of progress, characterized by desire for change, impatience of authority, disregard for precedent, and even contempt of law, it may be deemed proper for this Board to give some reasons why, in their organization of the college of medicine, they have paid so much deference to the authority of antiquity and so little respect to revelations of the present day. By reference to the catalogue of the medical faculty, it will be seen that they have made provision for instruction in anatomy, or a knowledge of the structure, form and relation of the parts of the human body-physiology, or a knowledge of the functions or uses of the organs-pathology, or the changes produced therein by disease-practical med. icine and surgery, which include the directions for arresting morbid action, removing its products and repairing the injuries arising from accident-materia medica, or a description of the remedies used for these purposes, with an account of their modus operandi—and obstetrics, embracing the doctrine of ovology-the theory of reproduction, including the development of the foetus in utero, and its expulsion when arrived at maturity. To these, as a means of qualifying the medical student for the discharge of certain duties, which the public authorities may call upon him to perform, the Board have added a professorship of chemistry and medical jurisprudence.

The foregoing is a synopsis of the curriculum or course of study required of candidates for medical degrees in the University of Michigan.

The Board of Regents, at the time of adopting this curriculum, were fully aware that there existed a sect who believe "that nothing can be perceived of the internal operations of the animal frame where life is disturbed by disease-who teach that it is only by means of the spiritual influences of a morbific agent that our spiritual power can be diseased-that the causes of disease cannot possibly be material, but that they originate in a dynamic (spiritual) immaterial cause, and can only be destroyed by dynamic (spiritual) power; that even the different species of worms are found only in patients laboring under a psoric (itch) affection-that the symptoms of disease are only the expressions of agony in the immaterial part of our nature, on which the curative remedies act by virtue of their spiritually countervailing agency-that behind these symptoms there is nothing to be learned of disease-that nothing can be learned of the effects or properties of medicines except from the morbid appearances which they excite in health-that a dynamic (spiritual) disease is extinguished by another more powerful, bearing a strong resemblence to it, a fact which they assert is confirmed by biology-that the medicinal disease must hence be more powerful than the one it proposes to cure that natural diseases cannot be overcome by the unaided vital energies-that any real medicine (Homeopathic) will at all times and under every circumstance, work upon every living individual-that notwithstanding the assertion that medicinal diseases expire, as it were, by virtue of a statute of limitations, and that both natural and medicinal diseases are spiritual dynamia, declare that the chronic affections arising from the use of bark, opium, mercury, silver, iodine, digitalis, sulphur, leeches and setons, effect changes in the organization, destructive to life, for which there is no remedy; that all chronic maladies, not the results of malpractice, on the part of old school physicians, arise from the miasm of syphilis, sycosis, and psora (itch;) that the latter (itch) is the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless forms of disease which, under the name of debility, hysteria, hemicrania, hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, rickets, ca

ries, fungus haematodes, gravel, hemorrhoids, jaundice, dropsy, amenorrhoea, epistaxis, asthma, impotency, sterility, deafness, cataract, amaurosis, paralysis, and pains of every kind which appear in our pathology as so many distinct diseases—that neither the skill of the physician nor the powers of nature had ever been able to cure a disease by an antipathic remedy-that a primary psoric (itch) eruption may be cured by ten globules of sulphur, if one be given in seven days-that where the remedy had been abused even years before, the smelling of one globule moistened with mercury, and allowed to operate nine days, will again render the vital powers susceptible to its operation-that one dose of mercury (X°) is sufficient to cure syphilis-that the professors of homœopathy propose to develop the immaterial (dynamic) virtues of substances not inherently medicinal, by mere manipulation, such as trituration with sugar, or dilution in alcohol-that the remedy can never be so small as to be inferior to the disease-that it effects exclusively the organism already suffering-that all that is curable by homoeopathy may, with the utmost certainty, be cured by inhaling the aura of one glob ule of sugar, of which one hundred weigh a grain, moistened with the remedy proposed to be used, even if the organ to which it is applied be in a state of paralysis-and that internal hemorrhages, threatening death, may be cured by magnetism, which recalls to life persons who have remained in a state of apparent death during long intervals of time, a species of resurrection of which history records many examples !"

But the Board itself held to the doctrine that man's material as well as his spiritual nature, is the subject of disease when he violates a law of its being, and that the diseases of the latter are only curable by the blood of the atonement. His physical system being formed of numerous elements, such as sulphur, soda, lime, iron, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, either chemically or mechanically combined, it may become disordered if either of them become deficient or exist in excess. Some of its diseases must of necessity arise from material causes, which will require remedies of a like material nature for their removal. This belief leads necessarily to a conviction of the importance of knowing man's structure, the uses of his organs, as well as his relation to the objects by

« AnteriorContinuar »