What does Adam Smith think about your medical degree?

This letter was written two years before "The Wealth of Nations", in 1774.

My favorite paragraph:

"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 sometime is, with some degree of modesty and diffidence."