518 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



important acting from within has been the use of animals. The study 

 of the great domain of infectious diseases has revealed such a similarity 

 between the diseases of man and the higher animals that we hesitate 

 now less than before to apply courageously the knowledge gained in 

 our experiments upon the highest mammals to human physiology and 

 pathology. Without this aid from animal life, medicine as a pro- 

 gressive experimental science would dwindle into insignificance. 

 Moreover, the artificiality, the rigidity and awkwardness of the medi- 

 cine of a generation ago have been largely dissipated by its contact with 

 biology, which brought with it the comparative point of view. 



Side by side with the use of animals we may place the convenient 

 use of bacteria and other microorganisms in our laboratories in pro- 

 ducing disease as one of the great levers of pathological research to- 

 day. They have enabled the investigator to establish important centers 

 of research completely independent of and coordinate with those con- 

 nected with the hospital and the dead-house. The latter, it is true, 

 still remains a final court of appeal for all discoveries destined for 

 the relief and cure of human diseases. 



In the historical development of science the research instinct ap- 

 peared at first sporadically, and until recently it was simply the spon- 

 taneous flowering of the scholarly mind in the highest institutions of 

 learning. To-day it has been actually organized not so much to train 

 youth as to produce useful knowledge. This new organization of 

 research has been greatly favored by the promise of valuable returns 

 in the suppression of infectious diseases of man and animals. Most of 

 the institutions founded thus far were created by public authority for 

 this purpose. It was realized that such work must be pushed forward 

 rapidly to secure results of value to public health and economy. 



About twenty-five years ago special laboratories began to appear. 

 Our own government figured among the earliest in voting what were 

 then very liberal appropriations for the study of infectious animal 

 diseases. At the same time came the German Imperial Health Office 

 and somewhat later the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, and 

 the Pasteur Institute in Paris; more recently there have been estab- 

 lished the Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfort, Germany, 

 and the many sero-therapeutic institutes and public health labora- 

 tories, nearly all of which have become noted for their research work. 

 In our own country we have last but not least the Eockefeller Insti- 

 tute for Medical Eesearch of this city and the Memorial Institute for 

 Infectious Diseases in Chicago. Most of these were created to deal 

 scientifically with problems of immediately practical bearing. But it 

 does not need a prophet to foresee that following them others will arise 

 which will devote themselves to broader and more fundamental prob- 

 lems and which will attack those left unsolved by the former institu- 



