Now! Then! Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, now a Cambridge professor, explains to Yorkshire College medics why university life is superior to a purely technical education

2 October 1893: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, now a Cambridge professor, explains to Yorkshire College medics why university life is superior to a purely technical education

The face of Goethe in the tiled café of Leeds City Art Gallery is said to have been destroyed during World War I and is still unrestored (Chemical Engineer 2017).

Leeds Mercury. 1893/10/03. Yorkshire College Medical Department. Leeds. Get it:

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In 1884 that fusion of the Leeds School of Medicine with the Yorkshire College took place which is already, and shall in the future be more and more the source of a larger, richer, and more generous education than a school of any single faculty, however admirably equipped, can give. In a university which deserves the name, you are versed, not merely in the customary exercises of your own profession, but you see, as in a prospect beyond that arena, other fields of knowledge, each in its relation to your own and the rest; loving your own province none the less, you will note its harmony with the great and fruitful shires which surround it, and with fields cultivated by other hands; thus, not being converted from provincialism to an indifferent cosmopolitanism, but with imagination enriched and reason enlarged, you will keep still in your hearts that affection for home, for the sphere of your own affections and the scenes of the labours of your own hands and of your comrades, without which you would be wanderers and no citizens… Remember that I am am not protesting against technical education. On the contrary, I rejoice in it. Invaluable is the discipline you gain by contact with definite things; no education is more hollow than the exercise of the mind in the air, the practice of dialectic, of “conjectural systematising,” or literary dalliance without close observation and measurement of the facts concerned. Such a practice is as though one were to exercise the function of digestion by swallowing wind… [But now] you have this priceless boon of a University at your doors; will you not pinch and pare, will not your parents pinch and pare to give you its blessings? or will you be content with petty aims, with common things, and with a narrow life? Ah! the old answer – “si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!” As Goethe says, “The flowers are full of honey, but only the bee finds out the sweetness.”

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.
Abbreviations:

ER: East Riding
GM: Greater Manchester
NR: North Riding
NY: North Yorkshire
SY: South Yorkshire
WR: West Riding
WY: West Yorkshire

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Objection: restoration is boring. So a lateral rose stem in iron + red ceramic roses grows out of the cavity along the ceiling, out of the aisle & into the nave thru the first arch. On the wall below a plaque with his friend Marianne von Willemer's 'Zarter Blumen reich Gewinde'

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YORKSHIRE COLLEGE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT. ADDRESS BY DR. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT.
Yesterday afternoon Professor Clifford Allbutt, M.A., M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., Regius Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge, delivered the opening address in connection with the winter session of the Medical Department of the Yorkshire College. The Chemistry Theatre, in which the address was given, was crowded by a large gathering of both medical and lay friends, who had assembled to give Dr. Allbutt a hearty welcome back to Leeds, among those present being most of the members of the professorial staff of the College, while the students were also there in large numbers.
Dr. Clifford Allbutt, who was cordially cheered on rising, said – To-day we are gathered together on no ordinary anniversary: we are entering upon a year which is the last of twenty-eight years of life and work within the walls which you will soon begin to call the old Schools of Medicine. It will sound strangely from my lips to say that these old schools are yet to me the new schools-that it seems to me but yesterday when we left East-parade for these buildings, erected by a courageous adventure of money, and opened with ardent anticipations of success, in 1865, by the Nestor of our profession, Sir James Paget. (Applause.) The opening day of that academical year was as proud a day for us as the opening day of next year will be to you. On the 3rd of October, 1865, we entered into possession of new buildings, which had been planned with an anxious foresight, in order, as we expressed it in our prospectus, “to retain the Leeds School in its old position, by keeping pace with modern improvements.” The new schools, we said, “should include every modern scientific appliance, and be equal to the work of the highest kind of teaching.” With a pardonable pride, we found, on entering it, that its efficiency and convenience realised our most sanguine hopes, and that the variety of its accommodation and resources made our new school “unsurpassed in educational opportunities by any similar institution in the kingdom.” It seems as yesterday, because I ain not yet too old to share with you the high anticipations, the courage, the spirit of enterprise, the devotion to a high standard of thought and purpose, which animated us then, and which animate you now; it seems as yesterday, because we are none of us too old to feel that we belong to to-day, because the broad and swift currents of human impulse, the fire of human aspirations, the achievements of human labour which make us all one, know no limits of months or years, and live in a continuous story. (Applause.) And yet in other hours and in other moods it is not as yesterday to me; when I regard the changes, nay, the revolution, in methods both of learning and of teaching, the expansion of knowledge, the new mastery we have gained over disease since the year 1865, I feel that a generation must, indeed, have passed since the opening of these buildings, and I realise that, fit as they then were to open the second chapter in the annals of the Leeds Medical School, they may well be narrow and imperfect now. Nor does that anniversary twenty-eight years ago seem as yesterday when I look round upon the band of my colleagues for whom I am now speaking, a band of men as able, as enthusiastic, and as loyal as ever, but one which is the poorer by the loss of comrades whom we mourn, by the loss of leaders whose memories we venerate and whose example we seek to follow. (Hear, hear.) In these moods I cannot feel that the opening of our school in 1865 was as yesterday; in these moods I forget not the gain, but I weigh heavily also the loss; I count the years which have brought pain and sorrow; I count the friends who are gone, the hearths which are cold, the hopes which have failed; and long and slow seems then the record of the days which are past. This year, to be the last in our old school, full of fair expectancy as it is, yet upon the broad bosom of its advancing tide bears also a burden of sad reflections.
Here, for some time, Dr. Albutt referred in eloquent terms to those eminent medical men in Leeds who had done so much towards raising the status of the Medical Schools and of the Infirmary, mentioning, among others, the names of Mr. Smith, Mr. Teale, Mr. Hey, Dr. Nunneley, the founder of ophthalmic surgery in Leeds; and Dr. Chadwick, the first physician whose scientific attainments and force of character made a great place for modern medicine in this county, and who became the natural leader of the movement which resulted in the building of that new Infirmary which made the fortune of the growing School of Medicine, and which had not yet ended in the great Yorkshire College, and that further development therewith of its medical department which they were to celebrate next year. Having paid a passing tribute to the services of Mr. Ikin, Mr. Scattergood, Mr. Wm. Hall, Mr. W. Nicholson Price, Mr. Seaton, Dr. Land, and Dr. Pyemont-Smith, Dr. Clifford Allbutt went on to say What were the labours of these men who have passed away? What seed have they sown? What of their works lives after them? In a few months you will step over the threshold of your old school for the last time, not without some sense of the sadness which clings even to the happiest changes of human life; when you linger a moment, as you pass onward, what thoughts of our fathers will you bear away with you? You will bear away with you a threefold monument which will dwell with you whether you are borne hither or thither; which is built into the walls of no one edifice; which passes not away with the tributes of this or of any one generation; the threefold monument of a great example, of a traditional idea, and of a school which has developed into a part of a University which, although founded in our own day, is already a great University. (Loud applause.) From notes supplied to me by your Dean, I find that in 1899-90 the number of Leeds students preparing for University degrees in medicine was 43; of these, 21 were preparing for the London degree, 10 for Durham, 6 for Cambridge, 5 only for Victoria, and one for Edinburgh. Now, let me turn to the past year, 1892-3. Of the 209 students who had actually passed into the medical department, 15 more – namely, 53 in all, were reading for University degrees: 5 for Durham, 5 for my own University (I cannot resist some ill-timed feeling of satisfaction with the persistence of our fraction), 22 for London, and 26 for Victoria. Besides these numbers, 23 students still in the Arts Schools were preparing for medical degrees. Victoria had thus gained no less than twenty-one more candidates for her M.B. degree; that is, more than one-third of the whole number. (Hear, hear.) What are the reasons for congratulating ourselves thus on the increase of University students? The chief reasons are two – first, that a University is especially the seat of a liberal education; secondly, that the rapidly increasing gains of Victoria are not due to any paltering with the high standards of her teaching; the high standards of her teaching, I say, not only of her examinations; examinations there must be, and these must be of a kind to test, so far as possible, a certain part of the student’s education, but a part only. In medicine this test is more than usually important, because the public must have some guarantee that its medical men know the principles of their perilous profession; but it is true, nevertheless, that an examination cannot test the better part of the student’s education, that invaluable part which is gained by membership of a University as compared with membership of a technical school. Such thoughts as these, if not leading them to imagine a consummation so high as that which one half-century has achieved, passed, I cannot doubt, through the minds of Turner Thackrah, of William Hey, of Thomas Teale, and the others of that far-seeing band of pioneers who, lamenting the antiquated theories, the narrow, shallow, scrappy rules and technical dodges, which made up the education of the ordinary master and apprentice of their day, desired, in founding their school, to initiate an idea and a formative scheme of education on a wider, deeper, and more permanent basis. Thus they founded what became a great technical school – thus they did, ably and honourably, the work of their generation; perhaps, as I have said, seeing darkly the greater work which was to come after them and bring honour to their successors. For, gentlemen, remember I have said that the education of a technical school differs from a University education in this, that the former is no more than a special adaptation of a man to a special sphere of usefulness, but the latter is a liberal education. A liberal education can be attained, and is daily attained by virtuous men, without a University: but it is those who have thus attained, who will tell you most earnestly how precious is the boon of that Alma Mater whose care they never knew. (Hear, hear.) What do we mean when we speak of a liberal education? I dare not attempt to answer this question in my own words, when I have before me the pages of that masterly treatise by the late Cardinal Newman, entitled, “The Idea of a University,” for in that treatise the question has been finally answered. Upon every page of it I may find an answer, and I am selecting at random when from the 166th page I draw the following sentences:-“In saying that law or medicine is not the end of a University course, I do not mean to imply that the University does not teach law or medicine. What, indeed, can it teach at all, if it does not teach something particular? It teaches all knowledge by teaching all branches of knowledge, and in no other way. I do not say that there will be this distinction as regards a Professor of Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of Political Economy, in a University and out of it, that out of a University he is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit, and of giving lectures which are the lectures of nothing more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or political economist: whereas in a University he will just know where he and his science stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height, he has taken a survey of all knowledge, he is kept from extravagance by the very rivalry of other studies, he has gained from them a special illumination and largeness of mind and freedom and self-possession, and he treats his own in consequence with a philosophy and a resource which belong not to the study itself, but to his liberal education.” Conversely, of what is called a useful education he says, quoting on p. 170 from Mr. Davison, “In this system (Mr. Edgeworth’s system of utility) the value of every attainment is to be measured by its subserviency to a calling. The specific duties of that calling are exalted at the cost of those free and independent tastes and virtues which come in to sustain the common relations of society, and raise the individual in them. In short, a man is to be usurped by his profession: he is to be clothed in its garb from head to foot; his virtues, his science, and his ideas are all to be put into a gown or uniform, and the whole man to be shaped, pressed, and stiffened, in the exact mould of his technical character. Any interloping accomplishments, or a faculty which cannot be taken into public pay, if they are to be indulged in by him at all, must creep along under the cloak of his more serviceable privileged merits. Such is the state of perfection to which the spirit and general tendency of this system would lead us.” We learn then that a union and concert of the faculties are necessary to a high standard in any calling, and this is to be secured by some training; and Newman, in another place, says, “This training is a matter of rule; not mere application, however exemplary; not reading many books; nor the getting up of many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, or the attending many lectures.” A man may do these things and “yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge.” He must be trained to arrange the things he has learned according to their real value; he must be trained in the building up of ideas. “Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind, it is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual self-possession and repose” – qualities which do not come of mere acquirements, whether gained by habit, imitation, or study. This discipline, to be won for its own sake, and which has its own proper object, it is the province not of a technical school to give, but of a University, and it is given by a University, not especially in virtue of its examinations, which can hardly test it, but by a tradition of ideas which are laid wide and high, by the harmony of its several faculties and various pursuits, by the enlarged experience and extended sympathies of its teachers, by the diversity of interests and conversation among its scholars of all parts. I trust that I do not abuse my position if I point out to you that the Examination Board which we call the University of London is a University in name only; and, on the other hand, that you have in Victoria, as in the older bodies properly called Universities, the training which we are seeking after. In 1884 that fusion of the Leeds School of Medicine with the Yorkshire College took place which is already, and shall in the future be more and more the source of a larger, richer, and more generous education than a school of any single faculty, however admirably equipped, can give. In a University, therefore, which deserves the name, you are versed, not merely in the customary exercises of your own profession, but you see, as in a prospect beyond that arena, other fields of knowledge, each in its relation to your own and the rest; loving your own province none the less, you will note its harmony with the great and fruitful shires which surround it, and with fields cultivated by other hands; thus, not being converted from provincialism to an indifferent cosmopolitanism, but with imagination enriched and reason enlarged, you will keep still in your hearts that affection for home, for the sphere of your own affections and the scenes of the labours of your own hands and of your comrades, without which you would be wanderers and no citizens. For, as Longfellow prettily says, remembering the aureum miliarium of the Roman Forum, “Each man’s chimney is his golden milestone from which he measures every distance through the gateways of the world around him.” Home, by which I mean a stable centre of thought and work, shall still be your fixed point, but you shall learn the paths and the gates which lead to other realms of knowledge. A University, then, however comprehensive, can scarcely be more than a stepmother to her children unless they live within her walls; unless her children of all callings assemble and unite together. (Hear, hear.) For many of you continuous residence in the College is impossible; but those are happier to whom it is possible, and I trust therefore that Lyddon Hall is but a small beginning of the completer College life that is to come. (Applause.) For those who cannot reside we must continually increase the facilities for meeting, and for the free intercourse of all classes of students. The new schools for the medical department could not, unfortunately, be placed within the precincts of the main building, but they are nearer to it than hitherto, and the more abstract scientific work of your first and second years is already carried on within these precincts. By the encouragement of students’ societies, by the growing sense of good fellowship, and by the consolidation of much of the teaching, I trust that even the non-resident may still breathe an academic atmosphere. (Applause.) Secondly, the growing success of Victoria has not come of any paltering with her standards. I violate no confidence when I say that Victoria has not been exempt from the three dangers which beset stronger and older institutions; these are first, the temptation to grasp at immediate popularity by so clipping the courses of instruction as to encourage a precocious maturity. This clipping would be applied to the general education which either precedes the technical or gives an intellectual quality to the technical – to that which we have called the liberal education – the utility of which is less instantly apparent although more permanent in its effects; in which it resembles those pleasures which, keener for the moment, have not the range of perpetuity. As Schiller has said, “Knowledge is to one a goddess, to another only an excellent cow.” It must not be urged that self-culture of a more general kind may come later, may come when your technical studies are over; that hope will not be fulfilled. If trees of this kind are to grow they must be planted young. The Yorkshire College has resisted successfully, and will resist any party in the Victoria University which would compete for present show, and trusts bravely in forfeiting the little to gain the great; our seed-beds shall not be for gaudy annuals but for perennial plants. (Loud applause.) It puts heart into us to know that, of the three Colleges of Victoria, our College, founded as it has been, nourished as it is, in a city devoted to gain, and by men hard driven by the pressure of instant competition, is of the three not the least sturdy in its defence of a large and sound training for its children, in its protest against all devices for forcing the pace. None know better than those who have been compelled to begin life without education how grievous was the loss to them of that intellectual growth which is the true preparation for life. Remember that I am am not protesting against technical education. On the contrary, I rejoice in it. Invaluable is the discipline you gain by contact with definite things; no education is more hollow than the exercise of the mind in the air, the practice of dialectic, of “conjectural systematising,” or literary dalliance without close observation and measurement of the facts concerned. Such a practice is as though one were to exercise the function of digestion by swallowing wind. (Laughter.) The interesting character – the note – of Victoria, its quality in which it will show to advantage when compared with the passing generation of Oxford and Cambridge is this solidity and reality, this Antaeus-like force which it gains by contact with the earth. For of the various arts of man which shall be called unworthy? Have we not said that the very function of a University, as opposed to a technical school, is that by seeing things great and small in the light of a wider experience it so transfigures them that nothing shall be called common or base in itself, but only in the commoness or dulness of him who so regards it. If, therefore, I speak of the technical bent as the second danger of this University, I speak not in respect of the subjects taught but in respect of the vision of the teacher, in respect of the ideas which the University brings to bear upon the interpretation of them. The danger of a heavy technical side is not in its contact with handicrafts, not even in its business with commercial work and interests, but lest these things be not seen in new lights, be not freshened by the relation of them to other departments of knowledge. As the second danger to be dreaded is but another aspect of the first, so is the third of the other two. Not in the medical only, but in other schools, we have made large changes in our methods of teaching. It was a cause of sterility, as I have said, in our older methods, whether medicine оr of other studies, that we sought truth only by contemplation – in the bottom of wells and the like. We have now turned ourselves about, and have provided large laboratories for our students, in which they study the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, or the arts of engineering, medicine, and the like, in what we call a practical way. Lectures are no longer in fashion; demonstrations have taken their place; our thoughts hop about deftly from fact to fact, as our hands from tool to wheel; truth, we say, is not learned by arguing, but by working and observing. (Applause.) Now, I do not say that we have gone too far in this saving reform of our methods; I say, however, that we may suffer if we regard only the tenacity of our hold upon those facts with which we are severally in contact; if thus we forget what virtues lay in those older methods which we are superseding, in the art of expression, for instance, and in the appreciation of those problems which can be tested only by the rules of probability. These latter problems belong to the highest spheres of human life, to ethics, and politics, and philosophy, and those we cannot afford to neglect, or even to push aside. Finally, by too close an application to one study, we may so limit or pervert our survey of life and learning as a whole as to defeat that aim and that purpose for which, as we have seen, a University exists. At Cambridge we pride ourselves upon the practical features of our teaching, and justly so; but there I am in a position to observe a defect of the art of expression, both of the art itself and of a due training in the terms and methods of systematic thought. Perhaps we are no worse in this respect than other seats of learning; the fault is one of the time, and of a reaction from the speculations of the closet which has produced results most valuable in themselves, but which need to be supplemented by some of the methods which we have too thoroughly discarded. The deeply rooted literary and philosophical traditions of the older Universities form a certain safeguard against a more than temporary extreme of specialism, and in them the contemplative life will always find its home: Victoria will give us rather the touch of reality, the grasp of going life, which will save us from becoming dreamy or fastidious. (Hear, hear.) The wisdom of our forefathers, then, tells us what the experience of our own time proves – namely, that to whomsoever is given the desire of success, either in the calling of medicine or in any other intellectual calling, his education must be liberal as well as technical in quality. Moreover, if I have carried you with me, a liberal education does not consist in passing showy examinations – examinations in which the standard required for the answers is often in inverse ratio to the magnificence of the questions – nor, again, necessarily in the mere mass of acquirements; but it consists in attitude of mind to be attained only by converse with various intellectual pursuits, and by that survey of the realm of human knowledge which shall give you a due sense of the proportions of its several departments. This end can best be attained by residence in a University, where all kinds of learning have their home; where the nurture and the manifold aspects of intellectual life are incorporated in a manifold body of professors, and where a tradition is maintained of that highest function of education, the love of learning, not for immediate mechanical uses, but for its own sake. To have the love of learning, not for these immediate uses, but for its own sake, is to have the fruits of a liberal education; and the men who have endowed the world with its most precious possessions have been men who pursued learning for its own sake. (Applause.) Is it not worth a great sacrifice, then, to get above the mere parsimonious adaptation of narrow rules to special uses, and to fetch a wider compass by becoming a member of a University in which you will breathe the air of larger ideas, where, to quote Newman again, “your knowledge will be transferred from the custody of memory to the surer and more abiding protection of philosophy,” where even the least important divisions of learning will converge and contribute to the mass of the whole and to each other, and where you will make yourselves rational and intelligent beings, and prove that wealth shall not be the one absorbing idea of your lives. These qualities come of University life as good manners come of good society, and can, no more than these, be tested in examinations or put out to immediate gain; but for their sake, and for their reward, such men as my ungainly scholar “pinched and pared, rose early and lay down late, ate dry bread and drank cold water.” You have this priceless boon of a University at your doors; will you not pinch and pare, will not your parents pinch and pare to give you its blessings? or will you be content with petty aims, with common things, and with a narrow life? Ah! the old answer – “si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!” As Goethe says, “The flowers are full of honey, but only the bee finds out the sweetness.” (Loud applause.)

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2 October 1893: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, now a Cambridge professor, explains to Yorkshire College medics why university life is superior to a purely technical education

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