ABSTRACT
The uncertainties voiced by the Philadelphia surgeon Thomas Bond illustrate how elusive excellence could be. In 1771, Bond asked his friend and fellow citizen Benjamin Franklin, then resident in London, to recommend a European centre for furthering his son’s medical studies. The son, Richard, had shown much promise in the study of ‘Physic and surgery’ and would soon be graduating from the medical school in Philadelphia: ‘… where to send him [in Europe] is with me a doubt’. Bond senior had fond memories of his own studies in Paris. But that had been more than 30 years ago; all his mentors there were now dead. He knew nothing of the current state of teaching in Paris and had misgivings about the schools in Leiden and Vienna. Bond praised the Paris Academy of Surgery for ‘uniting science to their profession’. While he acknowledged that most young American medical men opted for Edinburgh and London, Bond judged London surgery ‘a mere mechanic art’; and he faulted the Scottish capital for ‘extraordinary novelties’ ‘better calculated to please the fancy than to form the judgment’.1
