4o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to enable them to understand and apply what is being done by the 

 most advanced workers and discoverers? The training that the 

 medical student must undergo in order to enable him to comprehend 

 and apply with intelligence the new methods and discoveries in medi- 

 cine can not be obtained in a poorly equipped institution nor by poorly 

 equipped minds. It is for this reason that Harvard has hailed with 

 such joy the incoming of the means to equip her medical school 

 properly, and has so raised its standard of admission that the equivalent 

 of a college degree is demanded of those permitted to enter the school. 



The study of medicine, broadly considered, has reached such a stage 

 that its present day aspect can be taught only in a great university 

 and by university methods. The old-fashioned medical school served 

 its purpose; but it has had its day, and it can no longer prepare its 

 students to meet the demands of modern medical science. 



The new equipment of the medical school will greatly strengthen 

 the connection between it and the college at Cambridge. Hitherto it 

 has been a school apart from the main university, and many a man 

 has graduated from Harvard College without being made practically 

 aware that there is such a thing as the Harvard Medical School. It 

 will be possible under the new conditions to greatly enlarge the scope 

 of the electives that bear on a medical education that may be taken by 

 members of the college or other departments of the university. The 

 departments of psychology and physics in the university can now be 

 properly correlated with the Medical School both in pedagogy and in 

 original investigations. 



Hitherto the lack of space facilities and apparatus has made the 

 lecture room and the clinic the main features of student contact with 

 the professors of the school, and this has of necessity kept the feeling 

 of a technical school alive in the student body. The new equipment 

 will incite and foster the growth of the broader university spirit in 

 both study and research. The medical school will now be able to do 

 what it could not do before, that is, to offer facilities to students and 

 investigators of other departments of the university for special study 

 and research under medical school auspices. 



One of the most important features of the improved systems of 

 medical study is the learning how to use medical literature and the 

 acquirement of the habit of using it. It is only a small proportion 

 of the physicians of the country who can come directly in contact with 

 the special fields of investigation in medicine, and so the chief avail- 

 able channel for keeping up with current progress is through medical 

 literature. The Harvard Medical School possesses unusual facilities 

 for the training of its students in the proper use of the literature of the 

 science. In the first place there are the great general libraries of 

 Boston and Harvard College forming cojointly one of the best col- 



