'Eating the Heart Out of a Subject'

While speaking with an engineering student the other day, I recounted to him the fate of Mr. Krook, brother to Mrs. Smallweed in Bleak House, who burst spontaneously into flames and was reduced to a heap of ashes. He listened patiently and when I finished asked, “Who is Dickens?” I was reminded of the time twenty years ago, while working for a university in upstate New York, when I mentioned to an engineering professor Kipling’s 1902 short story “Wireless,” one of his best. He replied, in effect, “Who’s Kipling?” 

I won’t fulminate about these men. Both are intelligent and personable. The student is still an undergraduate and likely to do well in life. Ignorance of once-popular English literature won’t hold him back, though I marvel at how far we have descended in a mere century. Incrementally, decision by decision, educators and others, abetted by parents, have made aliteracy the default setting for our brightest kids. This has nothing to do with the brouhaha over the “Two Cultures.” We’re left with less than half a culture.

 

One of the great synthesizing minds of that culture is the Canadian-born physician Dr. William Osler (1849-1919), who helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital and established the first residency program for medical students. This admirer of Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne, in Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine (1904), wrote a prescription for a liberal education:

 

I. Old and New Testament

II. Shakespeare

III. Montaigne

IV. Plutarch’s Lives

V. Marcus Aurelius

VI. Epictetus

VII. Religio Medici

VIII. Don Quixote

IX. Emerson

X. Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Breakfast-Table Series

 

You can quibble with specifics, but you get the idea. Osler’s suggestions find applications far beyond medicine – and engineering. Incidentally, Osler befriended Rudyard Kipling. I’ve written about him several times. In a 1921 lecture, “The Student Life,” he writes:

 

“Divide your attentions equally between books and men. The strength of the student of books is to sit still—two or three hours at a stretch—eating the heart out of a subject with pencil and notebook in hand, determined to master the details and intricacies, focusing all your energies on its difficulties. Get accustomed to test all sorts of book problems and statements for yourself, and take as little as possible on trust.”