246 A Retrospect in Biochemistry [Dec. 



Thiis biochemistry and chemistry itself were intimately con- ,. 

 nected vvith the instruction given in medical schools throughout the 

 original States of the Union, and as the tide swept westward this 

 condition persisted until the end o£ the nineteenth Century. 



Professor John Torrey, whose name is so closely linked with 

 botany, was professor of chemistry at the College of Physicians and 

 Surgeons in New York, and Professor Benjamin Silliman, distin- 

 guished in so many branches of science, was Professor at Yale Col- 

 lege, as it was then known. 



When the medical department of the New York University 

 was founded in 1841, Professor John W. Draper was appointed 

 professor of chemistry, and as he was deeply interested in biochem- 

 istry, as shown by the title of his most important work, " The Forces 

 which Produce the Organization of Plants," N. Y. 1844, and was 

 the author of a text book on physiology, his teaching elucidated its 

 fundamental principles. His elaborate researches on light, the spec- 

 trum, photography, the tithonic, or dark rays, osmosis, and many 

 other chapters of the border land between chemistry and physics, 

 are some of the most notable contributions ever made to science. 

 When the American Chemical Society was founded, in 1876, he was 

 elected president. 



But while chemistry engaged the attention of all students of 

 medicine and was given more fully in medical schools than in the 

 Colleges, it was taught in lectures, and the students had no oppor- 

 tunity to perform experiments. The wonderful influence of Liebig 

 had not yet even spread through Germany, but was rapidly gaining 

 favor at the end of the forties. Not until 1850, when the New 

 York Medical College was founded, were medical students offered 

 the advantages of laboratory instruction, but required to take the 

 course quite like their dissecting in connection with the study of 

 anatomy. This Innovation was secured through the zeal of Pro- 

 fessor R. Ogden Doremus, to whom the chair of chemistry was con- 

 fided. A pupil of Draper, and his assistant for many years, he had, 

 through a visit to Europe in 1848, become imbued with the new 

 doctrine of laboratory instruction and was determined to initiate it 

 in the new Institution. He was also professor of chemistry in the 

 N. Y. College of Pharmacy. The students of that Institution, then 



