There never was, and I will venture to say there never will
be, a university from which a degree could give any
tolerable security that the person upon whom it had been
conferred was fit to practise physic. The strictest
universities confer degrees only upon students of a certain
standing. Their real motive for requiring this standing is
that the student may spend more money among them and that
they may make more profit by him. When he has attained this
standing therefore, though he still undergoes what they call
an examination, it scarce ever happens that he is refused
his degree. Your examination at Edinburgh, I have all reason
to believe, is as serious, and perhaps more so, than that of
any other university in Europe; but when a student has
resided a few years among you, has behaved dutifully to all
his professors, and has attended regularly all their
lectures, when he comes to his examination I suspect you are
disposed to be as good-natured as other people. Several of
your graduates, upon applying for license from the College
of Physicians here, have had it recommended to them to
continue their studies. From a particular knowledge of some
of the cases I am satisfied that the decision of the College
in refusing them their license was perfectly just--that is,
was perfectly agreeable to the principles which ought to
regulate all such decisions; and that the candidates were
really very ignorant of their profession.

A degree can pretend to give security for nothing but the
science of the graduate; and even for that it can give but a
very slender security. For his good sense and discretion,
qualities not discoverable by an academical examination, it
can give no security at all; but without these the
presumption which commonly attends science must render it in
the practice of physic ten times more dangerous than the
grossest ignorance when accompanied, as it sometimes is,
with some degree of modesty and diffidence.

If a degree, in short, always has been, and, in spite of all
the regulations which can be made, always must be, a mere
piece of quackery, it is certainly for the advantage of the
public that it should be understood to be so. It is in a
particular manner for the advantage of the universities that
for the resort of