“. . . a Scheme for transplanting Medical Science into this Seminary”
Delivered at the May 1765 College commencement and printed, with a preface, the same year, Morgan’s lengthy Discourse outlines his plans for the first medical school in the colonies. “This City, so large, in such a thriving state,” Morgan argued, would attract students from across the colonies. In a nod to the College as shaped by Smith and Alison, Morgan recommends students who have prior knowledge of Latin and Greek and who have benefitted from the school’s scientific curriculum. Students would learn theory in school lectures and practice at the Pennsylvania Hospital, “rendering the education of youth in the healing arts as compleat as possible in this city.” The boundless natural resources of the continent would allow them to make new discoveries, giving them an advantage over their European peers. Medical students would learn Anatomy, Materia Medica (the natural history and utility of all substances used in medical practice), Botany, and Chemistry, and “the Institutes of Medicine,” covering pathology, histology, and physiology.
Morgan’s address is also an attempt to delineate professional boundaries—to be exclusive as well as inclusive. He critiques the traditional apprenticeship-based system of medical training[1] and argues “Let each Man cultivate his respective branch apart, the physician, the surgeon, the apothecary.” That call would prove difficult to follow.
Some of Morgan’s arguments have a surprising modernity to them. He worries over the rising costs both of medical education and of drugs and pharmaceutical products. He discusses the challenge of setting fees and argues that physicians should do so transparently, with “moderation” a key goal, sliding scales depending on patients’ abilities to pay, and free treatments for the poor and for children, servants, and other household members in wealthier families.
Medical teaching, as in the College, was lecture-based. Lectures were often public, and admittance tickets, which were sold by the instructors, not the school, are evidence both of courses given and of attendance, particularly for those who never received formal degrees.
The lecture notes made by students are a crucial record of the school’s pedagogy and practice. This late eighteenth-century medical notebook taken from the lectures of Benjamin Rush by an anonymous student (possibly Robert Hare, son of a Trustee and later Professor of Chemistry), begins, appropriately, with an explanation of how to take notes. Students must learn by “reading books, hearing lectures, and observing diseases.” “Do not copy your notes during the lectures,” notes the student (or his teacher): lecture notes were prepared after lectures, for study purposes.
Bell, John Morgan, 121–122. ↑