This first step, this apprenticing, has a questionable tendency as regards the interests of the public and the profession. It exerts, also, a considerable influence on the character and disposition of the boy, which we must by and by consider. It is a mode of proceeding which, we fear, has done not a little to impede the progress of surgery as a science, and to maintain that handicraft idea of it suggested by the etymology of the word. Where one man strikes out a new path, thousands follow the beaten track. A boy, with his mind ill-prepared, having no _definite_ ideas of the nature and objects of scientific inquiries, and almost certainly uninstructed as to the rules to be observed in conducting them—knowing neither any distinction between an art and a science—a boy thus conditioned is bound for a certain number of _years_! to a man of whom he knows little, and to a profession of which he knows nothing. He takes his ideas and his tone from his master; or, if these be repulsive to him, he _probably adopts an opposite extreme_. If the master practise his profession merely as an art, he furnishes his pupil with little more than a string of conventionalisms; of which, if the pupil has talent enough to do anything for himself, he is tolerably certain to have a great deal to unlearn.
We believe the system is in course of improvement; it is high time it was put an end to altogether. Apprenticeships might not have been an inauspicious mode of going to work in former times, when there existed barber-surgeons. This alliance of surgery and shaving, to say nothing of the numerous other qualifications with which they were sometimes associated, might conceivably enough have furnished some pretext for apprenticeships; since Dickey Gossip's definition of
"Shaving and tooth-drawing, Bleeding, cabbaging, and sawing,"
was by no means always sufficiently comprehensive to include the multifarious accomplishments of "the doctor." I have myself seen, in a distant part of this island, within twenty-five years, chemist, druggist, surgeon, apothecary, and the significant &c. followed by the hatter, hosier, and linen-draper, in one establishment; but as we shall have to discuss this subject more fully in relation to Abernethy in another place, we may proceed.