tests, his entrance for a short time into the field of chemotherapy with 

 his studies of the antimony thioglycollates, his plasmapheresis and 

 his vividiflfiision ideas were more or less side interests which kept 

 him from his main line of work for a short time only. 



The fact that Dr. Abel had to take over the teaching and laboratory 

 work in physiological chemistry when he first went to Johns Hopkins 

 probably had little to do with this biochemical point of view. His 

 interest was definitely chemical before he went there, and although 

 he was always attracted to a great variety of problems having to do 

 with medicine in general, his primary interest seemed to be in the 

 fundamentals of the living organism rather than in the secondary 

 changes brought about by disease or intoxications produced by drugs. 

 It will be noted that, except in very fe^v instances. Dr. Abel paid little 

 attention to studying the action on the organism of the substances 

 with which he worked, that is, their so-called pharmacological action. 

 True it is that he used the reactions of the organism to separate his 

 various fractions and eventually his pure principles from complex 

 mixtures, but it was his aim to discover what these principles were 

 chemically rather than to study the complex reactions of the organism 

 after their injection. 



On returning to this country in 1914 after two years in Europe, I 

 found that my hearing would not allow me to go on with the clinical 

 work which I was then doing at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 

 Boston, and while wondering what could be done about it I suddenly 

 thought of how Professor Abel looked when I had seen him that 

 morning with Cushny in London. I immediately wrote to Dr. Abel 

 and asked if I might come to work in his laboratory. He replied 

 at once in the most friendly manner urging me to come there, and I 

 left for Baltimore wondering what I would find to do. After the white 

 marble walls of the Harvard Medical School and the new Brigham 

 Hospital, the Johns Hopkins Medical School building of that day 

 was not an impressive sight. My spirits went down as I climbed the 

 three long flights of stairs to the pharmacological laboratory where 

 I found Professor Abel in his small corner room, a test tube in one 

 hand and a capillary pipette in the other, in the process of adding a 

 minute drop of some extract to a solution. He immediately put these 

 down and greeted me with the utmost cordiality. In one corner of 

 the laboratory was an old, roll-top desk piled high with papers of all 

 kinds; and every available and unavailable space on the desk, a re- 

 volving bookcase, and a rather large table was heaped with books and 

 current periodicals. Within three feet of his desk was a standard 



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