want you to meet Dr. Lamson, who is doing some extraordinarily 

 interesting work whicli I am sure he would be glad to tell you about," 

 and with a wink of his one eye he would return to his laboratory. 

 I would like to know how many such visitors I have had to dispose 

 of for him in this way. 



In his last years, time became the most precious thing for Dr. Abel. 

 He would not relax but seemed to work harder than ever in the hope 

 of accomplishing something in what he knew was an ever-diminishing 

 period of time. He frequently spoke of hoping to last long enough 

 to accomplish some particular object. We would take our manu- 

 scripts to him as Editor of The Journal of Pharmacology and Experi- 

 mental Therapeutics, and although he was critical of outside publica- 

 tions, he assumed that the papers which we had written were worth 

 publishing and he hated to waste time on them. I would go into his 

 room with a manuscript, which he would take very giaciously and 

 with an air of intense interest. After opening it to one or two pages, 

 or not at all, he would hand it back with a pat on the back and the 

 remark, "That certainly is a fine piece of work. Just give it to our 

 secretary, and we will put it in the next number," and even while 

 handing it back, he would turn to his work once more. But if some- 

 thing needed attention, no matter what it was, he would drop every- 

 thing for it. After I had been in the laboratory for about a year, I 

 found that shutting off the arterial blood supply to the liver prevented 

 the production of polycythemia after the intravenous injection of 

 epinephrine, and I published this work in Dr. Abel's Journal. After 

 returning to the laboratory I tried to repeat these experiments, and 

 in the first two dogs which I used I was unable to do so. I was horri- 

 fied at having published something from Dr. Abel's laboratory that 

 was apparently not true, and decided that the best thing to do was 

 to resign and get it over with as soon as possible, so I immediately 

 went to Dr. Abel and told him what had happened. He listened to 

 what I had to say with much interest, and to my utter surprise 

 said, "But, Lamson, you must be right. Have you thrown away the 

 dogs on which you carried out these experiments?" Such absolute 

 confidence in an assistant not only endeared him to me for life but 

 made it an absolute necessity that what I might do in the future must 

 be well controlled. When I told him that I still had the dogs, he 

 said, "You must have some collateral blood supply which you did 

 not tie off." We went out to the laboratory, and he injected dye into 

 the aorta, and sure enough in both instances the dye immediately 

 went into the liver, showing that the blood supply had not been prop- 



38 



