224 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



partments of experimental pathology, experimental medicine or research 

 medicine. The title matters little, but the plan of the department 

 should be broad enough to care for the problems of clinical medicine, 

 and for this reason the word "medicine" should appear in the title 

 rather than the word "pathology." Such a department should keep 

 in close touch with the department of clinical medicine, should supple- 

 ment the facilities of the various hospital laboratories, and should also 

 work in cooperation with the fundamental laboratory sciences in 

 order to insure no loss of opportunity in the prosecution of its prob- 

 lems and thus a realization of the greatest good to the school. The 

 head of the department should be a man familiar with the problems of 

 clinical medicine, trained preferably as a pathologist, and with suffi- 

 cient knowledge of the possibilities of physiology and chemistry to apply 

 the methods of these subjects to clinical problems. I say preferably a 

 pathologist because the pathologist is more apt to combine clinical 

 training with a knowledge of pathology, bacteriology and the prin- 

 ciples of immunity than is the physiologist, chemist or pharmacologist, 

 though any one of the latter might well head such a department. Cer- 

 tain it is that whatever his own training may have been, the director 

 should, with his assistants, be able to utilize in the work of the depart- 

 ment the methods of physiology, chemistry, bacteriology and experi- 

 mental pathology. In other words, he should have a department capable 

 of attacking a problem in medicine from any or all sides, including 

 that of experimental therapeutics; and in order to make the work 

 effective, he should have the use of beds in the university hospital. 



The work of this department should be the investigation of clinical 

 problems, and not of academic problems of pathology, chemistry or 

 physiology. General practitioners, clinical assistants in the school and 

 even those at the head of clinical departments are constantly meeting 

 problems which demand solution, but find no adequate opportunity to 

 investigate them in departments as now constituted. These men would 

 find a place in the department suggested and should constitute an en- 

 thusiastic working staff which should be exceedingly productive in the 

 advance of medical knowledge. 



I may be over-enthusiastic about this matter, but I believe that 

 departments such as I have outlined are a necessary part of every large 

 university medical school, and must be developed eventually through 

 the combined efforts of the pathologist and the clinician, who have 

 naturally a greater interest in the problems of disease than have the 

 men of other departments and who must have a research department 

 devoted to their common interests. 



A department of this type, whether independent or affiliated with 

 the chair of medicine, I would recommend to every university which 

 sees its way to procure endowment for research in medicine, for in a 

 department of such broad scope lies the possibility of attacking many 



