THE REFORM OF THE MEDICAL CURRICULUM 641 



which was in vogue some thirty years ago, and has long been 

 superseded. Once the foundation is securely laid, the teacher 

 now loses no opportunity of working along physiological and 

 medical lines, and of tracing the lines of development in a 

 direction which will tend to elucidate the later work of the 

 student. So far from studying such irrelevant matter as the 

 aniline dyes, as has been fantastically suggested, the attention of 

 the student is directed to the chemical nature of such materials 

 as the proximate constituents of food — sugars, fats, and the 

 amino-acids from proteins ; of the degradation products of the 

 body — urea, the purine derivatives, lactic acid ; and of materials 

 such as will enable him to form an intelligent idea of the 

 chemical relations of the natural and artificial drugs with which 

 the pharmacopoeias abound. Surely it cannot be seriously 

 maintained that such matters are devoid of professional interest, 

 or that teaching which devotes a large amount of time to them 

 is unsympathetic. 



As to the extent to which chemistry should be taught to 

 medical students, the writer has long held very definite opinions, 

 which, through the courtesy and co-operation of his colleagues, 

 he has to a large extent succeeded in putting into practice. 

 Chemistry for medical students bears precisely the same 

 relation to physiology and pathology as anatomy does, the 

 chemist dealing with the nature and relation of the materials, 

 and the anatomist with the nature and relation of the structures, 

 the function of which in both cases it is the part of the 

 physiologist to investigate. All treatment of the nature and 

 relation of the carbon compounds met with in the animal 

 economy is thus the business of the chemist, whilst the phy- 

 siologist and pathologist apply the knowledge thus obtained to 

 explain the working of the organism in health and disease; in 

 the writer's laboratory, for example, students dissect chemically, 

 and, where possible, re-construct artificially, compounds such 

 as urea, which they obtain in the physiological laboratory as 

 natural products. Without a knowledge of the chemical nature 

 of the substances they deal with, the physiologist and patho- 

 logist are helpless, and this knowledge it is clearly the place of 

 the chemist to impart. Those who attempt to work at too 

 many branches of science run a serious risk at the present day 

 of being declared masters of none. 



We turn to the relative proportion of time which should be 



