right. The discussions at the lunch table took on the character of a 

 religious controversy, the Professor laying down the law about his 

 unitarian doctrine and the absurdity of that held by the trinitarians. 

 He insisted that it was the methods used by his opponents which gave 

 them their multiple active principles. For years it has seemed that 

 the Professor could not be right, but recent work indicates that there 

 is a ray of hope for his doctrine. 



In the previous sketches of Dr. Abel's life everyone has referred to 

 how hard he worked. This, I think, can be gathered from what I 

 have said already. During my stay in the laboratory Dr. Abel never 

 spent the evenings there, for he was getting on in years, but I never 

 dropped in on him at home but what I found him reading either 

 history or something bearing on his work. I never saw him read a 

 current novel. I have seen him work when he was so exhausted that 

 he could hardly stand or speak above a whisper, particularly in the 

 years after he had undergone an operation. At one time matters 

 came to such a pass that he could not remember the names of anyone 

 in the laboratory; he developed a very definite droop on one side of 

 his face which made his speech indistinct, and I felt almost certain 

 that if he kept on he would have a cerebral hemorrhage. I was un- 

 able to induce his clinical colleagues to talk to him about this, for 

 they felt that it was interfering with his personal affairs, so I finally 

 wrote the Professor a letter telling him just what I thought might 

 happen to him if he kept on working as he was doing, explaining that 

 if he should suddenly die, it would not be such a serious matter, but 

 that if he were paralyzed, it would be. I also offered to resign from 

 the laboratory if he did not wish to have someone around who was 

 interfering with his life. Dr. Abel was indisposed on this day, and 

 I left the note with Mrs. Abel at his house, wondering what the out- 

 come would be. At about five in the afternoon Mrs. Abel called me, 

 saying the professsor read my letter, remained silent for a few mo- 

 ments, and then said, "Mary, find out when the next train goes to 

 Atlantic City." After a few weeks' rest he was a different person. 



At this particular time Professor Abel had worked himself into a 

 state of collapse over the matter of a biophysicist. He was then very 

 much interested in the application of the infrared spectroscope to 

 the analysis of his pituitary fractions. He was so impressed by the 

 results of the experiments reported to him (although they were later 

 found to be valueless, since they were not correctly obtained) and by 

 the realization of the fact that those trained in physics might add as 

 much to medicine as those trained in chemistry had already done, 



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