RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 221 



ice as illustrated by the work and writings of Cabot, promises to give to 

 university research a new field of activity ; to medicine a powerful ally ; 

 and to society, an ideal, of great promise for the good of the community. 



To these various influences which I have presented at some length, 

 we may, I believe, ascribe what little advance has been made in univer- 

 sity research in medicine in this country. The same influences will 

 continue to operate. The breaking down of the hard and fast lines 

 which were drawn originally around the institutes of medicine will con- 

 tinue. As in the past, so in the future, the formation of new depart- 

 ments from the older departments will limit the field to be cultivated 

 by a single individual and thus the time devoted to teaching a single 

 subject will be divided, and as a result more time and opportunity for 

 productive investigation will be allowed. Already immunology clamors 

 to be released from alliance with bacteriology, hygiene or pathology; 

 protozoology claims a domain distinct from that of bacteriology; path- 

 ological physiology demands greater recognition; and a new field — ex- 

 perimental therapeutics — distinct from pharmacology, is already well 

 defined; all such expansions mean greater freedom and greater oppor- 

 tunity for investigation. These tendencies and the closely allied factor, 

 the increased recognition of the hospital as a place for research (and 

 especially the planning of groups of special hospitals, as at the Harvard 

 Medical School), represent the forces within the university which have 

 made progress possible. Of the forces from without which exert an 

 influence, one, already discussed, is endowment for special investigation. 

 A second is the influence exerted by independent institutions for re- 

 search, as the Eockefeller Institute and Hospital, which by its magnifi- 

 cent work has stimulated the better university schools to greater effort 

 in the advancement of medical knowledge. 



A third factor is the demand of a gradually awakening public 

 opinion that medicine should take a more prominent part, active and 

 advisory, in the affairs of the community. The effect of this demand 

 is already seen in the fact that the limitations and aloofness that char- 

 acterized medicine in the past have already begun to disappear, and we 

 can confidently look forward to a day when the activities of medicine, 

 on its research and preventive sides, at least, will be — if I may so ex- 

 press it — imbedded in the social system, and shall live by and for it. 

 In this connection, the university should not forget that the science of 

 bacteriology and the knowledge which it has popularized concerning 

 the etiology and control of disease and pestilence, formerly considered 

 as foreordained and without remedy, has brought to the race a new 

 hope concerning many of man's afflictions, and this hope is tinctured 

 with an impatient demand that all preventable diseases, whether due to 

 infection or occupation, should be thoroughly investigated. Preventive 

 medicine has become a great educational movement, the onward sweep 

 of which has been accelerated by modern views concerning the treat- 



