44 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



on the knees of the gods. The world was not ready for them. It was too 

 much absorbed in money-making, pleasure, politics, war, and other-world 

 religion to pay much attention to causes of disease, nor was the scientific 

 man properly equipped for the study of minute parasites. Apochromatic 

 glass and cultural equipment were things of the future . . . [T]here was 

 no science of bacteriology, no immunology, cytology, no genetics, no plant 

 or animal pathology worthy of the name, no public health service founded 

 on exact knowledge, and in nearly every case no well-ascertained remedies. 

 In fact, there was no medicine such as v/e now have based on the circle 

 of the sciences .... 



In America, before 1870, educational entrance requirements 

 were not in force in even the best medical schools. Laboratory 

 work and practice were almost unknown.^* "The teaching of 

 medicine as a science, as something of larger scope than its prac- 

 tice," Garrison has said,^^ 



began with the foundation of laboratories and with the gradual assemblage 

 of specialties as units in university instruction .... It was only toward 

 the end of the 19th century, under the direction of Eliot at Harvard, 

 Billings, Welch, and Osier at the Johns Hopkins, and Pepper in Phila- 

 delphia, that medical teaching began to be true university teaching, in the 

 sense of training a student to make use of his own mind as a substitute 

 for blind acceptance of dogma. 



Until that time, medical teaching had been mostly by lectures 

 and demonstrations, supplemented by text-book reading. 



Erwin Smith participated in discussions on hygiene at the Ann 

 Arbor Sanitary Convention."" During the following April,^^ 

 another similar convention took place at Greenville, and at this 

 Dr. John Harvey Kellogg spoke. He was a graduate of Michigan 

 State Normal School and the Bellevue Hospital Medical College 

 of New York City, and had not only founded but was also super- 

 intendent and surgeon of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Smith may 

 have heard his address on "Disposal of decomposing organic 

 matter," since, when in 1881 he reviewed^* the eighth annual 

 (1880) report of the Michigan State Board of Health he chose as 



"W. T. Sedgwick, A pioneer of public health, op. cit., 13-14. 



*^ Fielding H. Garrison, An introduction to the history of medicine, 4th ed., 

 755-756, Phila. and London, W. B. Saunders Co., 1929- 



"* 10th Ann. Rep't Sec'y St. Bd. of Health of Mich, for 1882; 202. 



^'^ Idem, acc't of meetings at Greenville, April 11-12, 1882. See also, Mich. Sch. 

 Mod. 2 (37): 262; 2 (38): 278. 



^"The school moderator (Michigan), 2 (11): 803, Nov. 24, 1881. 



