THE MARCH OF MEDICINE—WINTROBE 399 
patient, on his part, should expect of his doctor an appreciation of the 
advances which are being made and an understanding of their appli- 
cation—or at least the physician must know, if the problem is some- 
what complicated, how and where up-to-date methods and informa- 
tion can be obtained; for we have long passed the time when any 
single physician could apply and manage all the tools of medical 
science. It is not sufficient to have penicillin. Unless a diagnosis 
is made correctly and treatment initiated promptly, even this re- 
markable drug will fail. 
The establishment of a 4-year medical school in your midst should 
aid in the attainment of many of these goals. A good medical school 
is much more than a trade school which offers to a certain number 
of young men and women the opportunity of learning “the what” 
and “the how” as they are known today. By providing facilities for 
and encouraging research it brings to your midst and fosters in your 
medical community a spirit of inquiry, a search for newer knowledge, 
an awareness of, as well as the means for, evaluating advances in 
medical science wherever they may have been discovered. Such a 
spirit of inquiry must be inculcated in the medical student, for the 
best-trained doctor and the most effective is the one who is able to 
think, to seek out, to evaluate, and to apply. 
A good medical school must also be the center for postgraduate 
medical education. The physician who does not remain a student all 
his life soon falls behind. His needs are not met by occasional at- 
tendance at meetings. It is only by weekly and even daily confer- 
ences and discussions with his fellows and with experts in various 
special fields, that he can keep up. These are things that your medical 
school should do for you and your physician. 
+ * * * * 
Medicine has changed from an art based on a little knowledge, a 
greater or lesser amount of “common sense,” and a certain degree of 
nonsense and even of charlatanism, to become more and more of an 
exact science. This progress has brought with it certain problems of 
practical application but it also offers opportunities for benefiting 
mankind which are truly great and must be exploited. The advances 
in medicine have opened up as many problems as they have answered. 
To fathom the goings-on in a mechanism so complex as the human 
body, to determine the chemical reactions which take place in the 
myriads of cells of microscopic size and of many different types which 
make up this organism, to learn the workings of the mind and its 
relation to the organism as a whole, to discover the reasons why these 
different structures sometimes fail to function normally, and to find 
means whereby they can be restored to their normal activities, is a 
