222 INTERNAL MEDICINE 



The three main functions of a hospital the care of the sick, 

 the education of the physician, the advancement of science are 

 not to be met alone by building laboratories and operating-rooms 

 and lecture-halls, by furnishing the refinements of luxury to the 

 patient, useful adjuvants though these may be. What the hospital 

 mainly needs is men, men to study and think and work students of 

 medicine. 



It cannot be denied that in this respect we in America are behind 

 our cousins of the Old World. Despite our many honorable achieve- 

 ments, the part which we are taking in the modern study of the 

 physiology of disease is still not what it should be. 



Ere long we must come to realize that our duty to the sick man 

 consists in something more than to afford him that which most sick 

 animals find for themselves a comfortable corner in which he may 

 rest and hide from the world; that our duty to the public is to give 

 them as physicians, men of the widest possible general training, 

 ready to enter upon independent practice with an experience suffi- 

 cient to render them safe public advisers; that our duty to ourselves 

 is to miss no opportunity for the study of pathological physiology at 

 the bedside of the patient; that the accomplishment of these ends 

 depends in great part upon the appreciation by our universities and 

 hospitals of the mutual advantages of cooperation in affording every 

 opportunity for the scientific study of disease while offering to the 

 patient the privileges of enlightened observation and care. 



But there are everywhere signs of a future rich in achievement. 

 An improving system of medical education, the increasing oppor- 

 tunities for scientific research offered as well by the generosity of 

 private citizens as by the wisdom of state and national governments, 

 the community of effort which results from closer fellowship among 

 students of all nations, are omens of great promise. The remarkable 

 developments of the last twenty years in all branches of the natural 

 sciences have brought a rich store of suggestion and resource for 

 application in our laboratory, which is at the bedside of the patient. 

 Let us look to it that our clinical methods keep pace with those 

 which are yielding so abundant a harvest in these neighboring 

 fields of scientific research. 



