THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



619 



factory state of afluirs. The General 

 Education Board, endowed by Mr. John 

 D. Rockefeller, has api)ropriated about 

 one and a half million dollars to estab- 

 lish a William II. Welch fund. The 

 revenue is to be used to enable the 

 school to reorganize the departments of 

 medicine, surgery and pediatrics so that 

 the professors and their associates in 

 the clinics and the laboratories shall be 

 able to devote their entire time to their 

 work. They are free to see and treat 

 any one, whether inside or outside the 

 hospital, but they will accept no per- 

 sonal fee for any such service. 



The situation is clearly one of great 

 difficulty. The professor of medicine 

 or surgery may earn fifty to a hundred 

 thousand dollars a year by his private 

 practise. If he relinquishes this for a 

 salary of $10,000, the income may ap- 

 pear ample to the young physician, but 

 scarcely so to the consultant, to whom 

 the automobile has becom" one of the 

 necessaries of life. If the salary is 

 made larger than $10,000, an apparent 

 injustice is done to the professor of 

 physiology or Greek having equal abil- 

 ity. Then any socialistic scheme of 

 this character limits the freedom of ac- 

 tion of the individual, and under the 

 existing system of university organiza- 

 tion the limitation may be irksome and 

 may even be subject to a serious trade 

 risk. There is danger lest the ablest 

 men may not want the professorships 

 in the medical schools under such con- 

 ditions. 



Still the movement is surely in the 

 direction that must ultimately prevail. 

 The physician should be paid by the 

 state to preserve health rather than be 

 employed by the patient for a service 

 which it is usually beyond his power to 

 provide. In the face of opposition 

 from the larger part of the profession 

 the British government has this year 

 provided a wide-reaching system by 

 which the physician is largely paid by 

 the state in accordance not with the 

 number of visits he makes, but in pro- 

 portion to the number of persons who 



select him. It may be that before long 

 under the control of the state of- 

 ficers of our railways and industrial 

 trusts will receive salaries on condition 

 that they do not engage in outside 

 business. A medical school and hos- 

 pital which provided the best attainable 

 medical and surgical skill could prop- 

 erly charge the rich fees in accord- 

 ance with their incomes and earn large 

 amounts to be used for medical re- 

 search and the promotion of the health 

 of the community. It might not be 

 advisable for all medical schools to 

 adopt the qualifications for students 

 and professors of the Johns Hopkins 

 school, but it is well that there is at 

 least one such institution in the United 

 States. 



SCIENTIFIC ITEMS 



We record with regret the death of 

 Dr. Philip Reese Uhler, since 1891 pro- 

 vost of the Peabody Institute, Balti- 

 more, known for his contributions to 

 entomology and geology; of Dr. Charles 

 McBurney, formerly demonstrator of 

 anatomy and professor of surgery in 

 the College of Physicians of Columbia 

 University; of Sir William Preece, the 

 distinguished British electrical engineer; 

 and of M. Charles Tellier, the inventor 

 of the cold storage system. 



It is announced from Paris that M. 

 Charles Richet, professor of physiology 

 in the university, has been awarded 

 the Nobel prize for medicine. — Dr. 

 George E. Hale, director of the 

 Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, has 

 been elected an honorary fellow of the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh. 



Professor Willard C. Fisher, 

 whose forced resignation from the chair 

 of economics and sociology at Wesleyan 

 on the alleged ground of his views on 

 Sabbath observance will be remembered, 

 has been appointed lecturer on econom- 

 ics at Harvard University for the cur- 

 rent academic year. 



In connection with the Sixth Interna- 

 tional Congress of Mathematicians, to 



