BE SEARCH IN MEDICINE 223 



life, but also, and what is more important, to a prolongation of years of 

 useful activity and, perhaps, to a serene instead of painful final deletion. 



This leads to the discussion of a new type of department in the 

 medical school, departments or chairs for research only. That such de- 

 partments are now necessary is the direct result of the unwise policy 

 which, in the past, has led university presidents and medical faculties 

 to appoint as heads of departments men who have little or no training 

 as investigators and no interest in research. As the modern view of the 

 duties of a medical school — teaching, the first duty, but investigation 

 the corollary, essential not only for its own sake, but also for its influ- 

 ence on teaching — gains ground, university authorities find their chairs 

 encumbered with men incapable and disinclined to conduct genuine 

 university departments. New chairs, for research only, are therefore 

 established in order to evade the penalty of a wrong policy and at the 

 same time to secure men with the training and ideals of the investi- 

 gator. 



When university presidents learn that every professorship, clinical 

 and otherwise, ought to be in some measure a research chair, and that 

 research must be combined with teaching, the need for special depart- 

 ments of research will not be so urgent. It is true that clinical teachers 

 are not united on this point ; indeed, the weight of their opinion is often 

 thrown in the opposite direction. For example, the anti-university 

 conception of the university clinical professor has recently been very 

 clearly presented by Professor Barker in an extremely plausible argu- 

 ment, in the course of which he proposes that two chairs should be 

 created in the department of medicine — one for teaching and the finan- 

 cial prosperity of the incumbent, and the other for resarch ! No more 

 objectionable proposition from a university point of view has ever been 

 made. Officially recognized and sanctioned separation of research from 

 teaching, especially in the clinical chairs, would not only place the uni- 

 versity on the level of the secondary school, but would delay all progress 

 in medicine, and, more important still, destroy what little confidence 

 the public is beginning to have in the altruism of university medical 

 education. Let us hope that such counsels may not prevail. Let us 

 work for the recognition of the principle that teaching and research 

 should be combined in every department of the medical school. In the 

 meantime, special departments of research may well be created, not 

 only to make up for the sterility of the other chairs, but in order to at- 

 tack problems that are of such magnitude and complexity that they 

 may well engage the entire time of those devoted to them. But neither 

 research professorships nor research institutes can ever relieve the pro- 

 fessor of medicine or of surgery from the duty and obligation to con- 

 tinue to be creatively occupied in the development of their respective 

 departments. 



Existing departments of research are variously described as de- 



