524 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Much confusion can be avoided, I think, by classifying laboratories 

 into two categories, those that inculcate principles of medical science 

 and those which subserve clinical diagnosis. In the latter, clinical 

 medicine or medical practise seeks to lay hold of the acquisitions of 

 experimental science and to utilize them in the interpretation of 

 symptoms. The clinical or hospital laboratory approaches medical 

 problems from the professional side and is thus an extension of medical 

 practise into a territory where science and practise meet and shade 

 into one another. Here the future physician should receive most care- 

 ful training when he begins to direct his studies toward some branch 

 of medicine. For this important stage the Harvard Medical School 

 has left the fourth year open. In this year the student should utilize 

 all possible means of combining his practical training with the more 

 analytic methods of the laboratory and exploit whatever it may offer 

 in more accurate methods of making and recording observations. At 

 the same time, we must not make the mistake of calling this research. 

 It may later on shade into research, but it is at first simply increasing 

 and perfecting the means of identifying already well-known disease 

 processes. 



We are just now passing through a period of reaction against so- 

 called book learning which is likely to lead us too far in the other 

 direction. So much weight has been placed upon the training of the 

 senses that we are in danger of neglecting the mind behind them. It 

 is vaguely assumed by some that laboratory work is per se research. 

 This is far from the truth. We might with profit carry on researches 

 in the published work of others without entering the laboratory. We 

 might, on the other hand, spend our whole life in a laboratory without 

 acquiring more than a little manual and optical dexterity. We are in 

 danger of forgetting that the training of the observational powers is 

 simply developing another language made necessary by the expansion 

 of medicine as a biological science. The true investigator may have 

 but imperfectly trained senses, but he may still succeed in discover- 

 ing and opening up a new country to us. With his intellectual power 

 to grasp and arrange data, largely worked out by others perhaps, he 

 finds his way through the unknown. 



In our zeal to further the educational methods of the day, there 

 is just as much danger that we overload the mind with too many sense 

 impressions, as with too many facts gathered through the medium of 

 books. Have we not heard of the absurd waste of time in some labora- 

 tories over work employing laboratory technique which is as empty as 

 the written page to many a student? Have we not seen many a 

 laboratory servant whose senses were sharper than ours on occasion; 

 many a butcher who detected abnormalities of the tissues more quickly 

 than we? Yet they were not ' doing research.' Let us not deceive our- 



