Speculum - University of Melbourne

32
SPECULUM
teach systematically unless the university
recognised them as official lecturers.
Brownless, the architect . of medical education,
was concerned at the poor state of
clinical teaching; it was all the more disturbing,
he said in 1882, because the medical
school of Melbourne was certain now to
supply the colony with most of its doctors.
Fewer British practitioners were arriving
than thirty years earlier, and 180 medical
students were now enrolled at the university.
He therefore advised the university
council to appoint clinical lecturers from the
hospital's medical staff. It was hard to see
any other solution unless .a crucial rule of
the hospital was amended. In medical
schools like those at the London hospitals,
the problem faced in Melbourne did not
arise; theoretical and clinical instruction
were under the same authority. At the
most distinguished university schools the
medical faculty had either its own hospital
or effective control over a neighboring one.
Since the university could not appoint its
own teachers to. the staff of the hospital,
Brownless' advice was accepted in 1884.
T. N. Fitzgerald and John Williams, honor-
ary medical officers to the hospital, were
appointed by the university council as Lecturers
in Clinical Surgery and Clinical Medicine
respectively, at an annual salary of
£250.
The medical faculty had often declared
that a thoroughly efficient course of training
in medicine was impossible so long as
the university had no voice in the appointment
of honorary medical officers at the
hospital, and therefore no guarantee of their
fitness as teachers. But members of the
faculty were pleased by the appointment of
these two men. Fitzgerald was the only
senior surgeon in the hospital who visited
the wards regularly for the benefit of the
students. Sir George Syme, who studied
under him in 1880, wrote later: "Mr. Fitzgerald
was the one surgeon for whom
everyone wished to dress, and whose visits
all attended. His great personality, his keenness
of observation, and his enthusiasm, not
less than his brilliance as a diagnostician
and operator, made him a most stimulating
influence." Students learned more from
watching Fitzgerald than from listening to
him; his oral instruction was informative,
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