The first step has been the establishment in connection with most
schools of general hospitals in which the various teachers in the
college should be the clinical instructors, and where the students
would have the means not only of hearing theoretically what should be
done to the sick, but of actually examining the patients under the
supervision of their instructors, studying the cases so as to become
skilled in reaching a diagnosis and indicating what in their opinion
was necessary in the way either of hygiene, medicine, or surgical
operation. More than that, in most of the advanced schools to-day the
students assist the clinical faculties of the hospitals in the actual
performance of operations, so that when they graduate they are skilled
to a degree utterly unknown twenty years ago.