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MEDICAL TEACHING. 397
poor financial condition of the universities, brought about
the result that, nearly everywhere, several subjects were
represented at the same time by one professor. Thus, at
most academies, the teaching of botany and chemistry was
united with that of materia medica; in the same way
anatomy was joined to surgery, physiology to anatomy, or
to general pathology. To such a length was this combining
of subjects carried that professors of another faculty—that
of philosophy for example—held lectures upon particular
branches of medical science just as, on the other hand, it
not unfrequently happened that doctors ventured to teach
sciences far removed from their proper sphere. H. CONRING
not only taught medicine in Helmstadt, but philosophy and
politics as well, and was, as O. STOBBE says, " the founder of
the history of German law." MEIBOM lectured upon history
and the art of poetry, as well as upon medicine, and
JOHANN HEINRICH SCHULTZE, besides being professor of
medicine at Altdorf, held the chair of Greek also, and in
Halle, to which town he afterwards removed, that of
elocution and archaeology.
The universities of that time resembled, in this respect,
our gymnasia of to-day, at which, sometimes, a teacher of
mathematics takes over a part of the lectures of the teacher
of philosophy, and vice versa. It was at that time not
required of an academical teacher that he should have
advanced by any work of his own the science upon which
he lectured. Patronage, relationship, personal preferences,
and accidental circumstances of all kinds were often the
causes which led to the conferring of a professorship. The
stipends, for the rest, were sometimes so insignificant that
there were hardly any candidates. At the small academies
they had to be contented, if one of the doctors in the neigh­
bourhood declared himself willing to undertake a professor­
ship in the medical faculty, which, however, he perhaps
relinquished as soon as the prospect of a lucrative practice
in a larger town was opened to him. It was usual at the
German universities for the teacher to make a treatise or