A Lecture ENTITLED AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF CLINICAL SURGERY: Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Hospital on December 16th, 1903
Authors: C. B. Lockwood
Journal: BMJ (1903)

t3 I57g profession in this matter of registration.One example of administrative and one of educational bearing will prove this.Four years ago I pointed out, in the General Medical Council, that personation was committed by various evil- minded persons, who obtained medical practice by personating persons on the Register.It would have been supposed that that would have excited the sympathy of the Council: I met with nothing but hostility in bringing it forward.Eventually I obtained the appointment of a committee.That committee reported that the occurrence of personation was an important fact, that the regulations ought to be amended to prevent personation, and so on.The officials of the Council resisted me in every possible way, even with regard, to the provision, insisted on by all Government departments and universities, that every person who wanited to regis- ter should write out the application in his own handwriting, so that we could trace that handwriting in future years.That precaution was actcally opposed by the officials of the Council.After from three to four years' hard work, at last we got our report adopted.Take another example: the education of medical students in preliminary science, etc.It has been a notorious scandal in London for many years, that the examination of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians in the preliminary sciences was hopelessly inadequate, that it was wholly faulty in principle, and that students were admitted to it who were not properly trained.Ten years ago the General Medical Council issued a decree relative to the five years' curriculum, which, if it had been loyally carried out, would have prevented this scandal.It was not loyally carried out, however.The Royal Colleges in England took the lead in evading it, and the Irish corporations in particular complained to the General Medical Council on that score.My first experience at that Council was to hear a discussion on that question.So it has gone on.This, gentlemen, is called "honesty" in medical politics.Because, I have called it dishonesty I have been called to account.I intend to call it dishonesty again, because the position in which we now are is that, although these discussions have been going on all these years at a cost of at least 21,200 to the profession, we are exactly to-day where we were before-namely, that the Colleges resist the decisions of the Council on a point in which authoritywasvested in the Council by the Acts of i858 and i886.Last session I succeeded in carry- ing a resolution in the Council to the effect that the examinations of the Royal Colleges were insufficient.This session I moved that we should take the next step and go to the Privy Council.The Colleges, although professing that their exami- nations were all that could be desired, seerptly began to alter them without letting the General Medical Council know, and this was brought up by Dr. Py.-Smith and Mr. Bryant as a reason why the Council should do nothing in the matter.To my mind, politics, like ordinary transactions of life, should be characterized and governed by the ordinary rules of honour- able conduct, and it appears to me that the action of the Colleges is not honourable.Further, not only is this the state of things in the General Medical Council by virtue of the Council's constitution, but it is leading to a decay of medical education as a whole.At the last day of the recent session of the Council a project of the Apothecaries' Hall in Ireland, which is a body which with great difficulty grants a licence to three or four men per annum, was brought forward-a project to abrogate all the decisions of the Council with regard to preliminary education and to start an examination on its own.It simply meant that this Hall, seeing that the English Colleges are flouting the decisions of the Council, intended itself to follow that bad example.It is a logical but a very immoral position.