XTTT STATE AND THE -MEDICAL PROFESSION 345 



time, in this little place of four or five million 

 inhabitants which supports so many things, any 

 organisation or any arrangement for advancing the 

 science of medicine, considered as a pure science. 

 I am quite aware that there are medical societies 

 of various kinds ; I am not ignorant of the lecture- 

 ships at the College of Physicians and the College 

 of Surgeons ; there is the Brown Institute ; and 

 there is the Society for the Advancement of Medi- 

 cine by Research, but there is no means, so far as 

 I know, by which any person who has the inborn 

 gifts of the investigator and discoverer of new 

 truth, and who desires to apply that to the 

 improvement of medical science, can carry out his 

 intention. In Paris there is the University of 

 Paris, which gives degrees ; but there are also the 

 Sorbonne and the College de France, places in 

 which professoriates are established for the express 

 purpose of enabling men who have the power of 

 investigation, the power of advancing knowledge 

 and thereby reacting on practice, to do that which 

 it is their special mission to do. I do not know of 

 anything of the kind in London ; and if it should 

 so happen that a Claude Bernard or a Ludwig 

 should turn up in London, I really have not the 

 slightest notion of what we could do with him. 

 We could not turn him to account, and I think we 

 should have to export him to Germany or France. 

 I doubt whether that is a good or a wise condition 

 of things. I do not think it is a condition of things 



