MEDICAL RESEARCH. 527 



motive power behind them they are more than barren; they create the 

 debts rather than the assets of research. This motive power consists 

 of enough assured income to carry on research and develop the re- 

 search powers of meritorious students. There should also be ample 

 means for laboratory service. Kesearch is in one sense a business, the 

 laboratory a workshop. Here all sorts of processes are under way 

 and as no one would expect a workshop to be carried on with only a 

 foreman, so a laboratory can not be kept in use without laboratory 

 service. Hitherto assistants have been made the motive power and the 

 laborers; but this system should no longer be maintained. Not only 

 is it wasteful to fill the time of assistants with routine manual labor, 

 but it is wasteful in so far as the laboratory is dismembered at the 

 end of each year. Every laboratory should be in working order even 

 if all assistants are lacking. The trained laboratory servant should 

 represent the routine and conservative, the assistants and investigators 

 the progressive, element. 



With the growth of the cost of research it becomes of great im- 

 portance to exercise care and selection in admitting men to research 

 positions. Fortunately there are not many collateral attractions in a 

 life of research and the process of elimination acts as a rule automat- 

 ically. Still there is danger just now that some of the flotsam and 

 jetsam caught in an eddy or else afraid of the current of practical 

 life may seek the quiet of the laboratory, because of some imagined 

 taste or capacity which fails to materialize later on. It is far better 

 not to have any research workers than poor ones. 



The leaven of research which has so completely permeated and 

 revolutionized all doctrines and practises of medicine in the past 

 quarter century is still acting and no one can foretell how it is going 

 to mold the medical science and practise of the coming decades. No 

 one can foresee what it is going to do with the medical schools. 



There will come without doubt much change in the artificial 

 boundaries of the present so-called departments. Created for pur- 

 poses of teaching and administration, they are a veritable bane to 

 the investigator who can not stop mining because his vein happens 

 to dip into another man's- superficial territory. Even in the routine 

 of teaching many changes are likely to come. I believe there will be 

 developments in two main directions. The present laboratory studies, 

 or propasdeutics, will be deepened and extended in the direction of the 

 more exact sciences, or toward the physical, chemical and biological 

 work of the university proper. As a necessary result of this move- 

 ment much of the work now done by these departments will move for- 

 ward into clinical medicine and surgery, and there will be a corre- 

 sponding growth and strengthening of the clinical and pathological 

 laboratories of the hospitals. To illustrate : Much of what is taught 



