Along with this chemical work goes the reading of selected chapters 

 of a good textbook, recitations, and informal talks by the instructor 

 on special subjects, as the commoner poisonous plants of the country, 

 or the intoxications met in the modern arts and industries. The talk 

 or the recitation, as the case may be, is held early in the afternoon, 

 before the laboratory work is begun. An hour on one other day on 

 which no laboratory work is done is also given up to a recitation on 

 assigned subjects. 



It will be seen that there is little in the way of didactic lectures. 

 The student profits most when, for example, he has himself detected 

 opium in some mixture and has read his Blyth, Kobert or Lewin and 

 tiien meets his instructor, to discuss with him, in an informal manner, 

 the chief points in the physiologic action of the poison in its chronic 

 use, or in its medicolegal significance and chemical detection. His 

 previous reading has aroused his interest, and taken in connection 

 with his chemical experiments and the demonstration on the living 

 animal, it has prepared him for a conference whose chief aim is to 

 help him to separate the essentials from the nonessentials. 



The remainder of the year is devoted to pharmacology. This course 

 is only in part a laboratory course, the class working in sections of 

 four. Even if it is impossible for the student to perform more than a 

 half-dozen experiments, this kind of work is too valuable to be omit- 

 ted. Nowadays, when simple apparatus can be had at a comparatively 

 low cost, it is not a matter of great difficulty to give every four students 

 out of a class of 75 a number of highly instructive experiments. These 

 may be so arranged that the student himself learns the chief pharmaco- 

 logical facts involved, say, in the action of ether and chloroform, 

 the diuretics and purgatives, atropin, morphin and chloral, or dig- 

 italis, the nitrites and other agents that have a pronounced action on 

 the circulatory apparatus. 



I would, therefore, urge that at least 5 or 6 topics be made the 

 subject of laboratory experiments to be preformed by the students 

 themselves under competent direction. The "artifically contrived ex- 

 periment" has made the subject what it is; it is that instrument of 

 knowledge with which the teacher and investigator tests the theories 

 of the day; it is his very shortest road to certainty of opinion. Why, 

 then, should it not give a clearer insight to the student also? As 

 Porter so tersely puts it, "the meat on which professors are nourished 

 is just the diet for students." 



As for the rest of the experimental work, numerous class demon- 

 strations are necessary. The work in physiology, perhaps going on at 



66 



