MEDICAL RESEARCH. 519 



tions. Of this latter class the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the 

 Kockefeller Institute are conspicuous examples. 



The founding of research institutes does not guarantee their 

 success. That will depend upon the men who work in and for them. 

 It has become evident that our research workers must have more 

 diversified training than the older generation possesses. The store of 

 knowledge accumulated by science must be made available to medi- 

 cine. The only way in which this can be accomplished is to have 

 trained men continually examining and testing this accumulating 

 store of facts and applying them to the problems of disease. Such 

 men should have medical training and approach their problems from 

 the medical point of view; but to them should be spared the necessity 

 of learning ultimate details of the medical art and they should give 

 their energy to some sister study, be it morphology, physiology, chem- 

 istry or pathology. Medicine has just begun to realize the need of 



* 



drawing to itself the great talent which hitherto has had an open door 

 only to the pure and applied sciences. Eesearch is largely dependent 

 for its successful pursuit upon an attitude of the mind which insists 

 on following a clew that promises to reveal some relationship, some 

 law of causality between phenomena hitherto apparently unrelated. 

 This type of mind has many of the attributes of the inventor who is 

 attempting to combine to our advantage the forces of nature in new 

 and unlooked-for ways and to express them in the form of labor-saving 

 machines. In order to attract these minds we must pay them a living 

 wage and provide workshop and tools, and exercise but moderate re- 

 straint over their activities. To them the exterior of practical medicine 

 has a forbidding aspect. "We must bring them to face its really won- 

 derful problems through the portals of the laboratory. 



After we have established research institutes and brought together 

 a devoted, enthusiastic group of scientists we must not look too closely 

 at the immediate practical value of research. Most of the epoch- 

 making discoveries have had little, if any, direct influence on medical 

 practise at the start and even for some time after. Some have wholly 

 failed to yield hoped-for results, but they have had great influence in 

 unexpected directions. This is chiefly because great discoveries are 

 as a rule not ripe for use. To point out a hitherto unrecognized cause 

 does not thereby enable us to overcome its effects. These may be 

 grounded in centuries of adaptation. A great discovery frequently 

 does no more than call attention to a new fact without defining its 

 relationships. The discovery of the tubercle bacillus for example left 

 the whole question of its complex relation to a given host untouched. 

 The same may be said for most other microbes. The delicate equilib- 

 rium between parasite and host is the thing to be worked out before 

 we can rationally proceed to upset it in our favor. There is there- 



