July 30, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



137 



ical branches consists now, as formerly, of 

 exercises in the clinics and operating rooms 

 of the hospital and the dispensary, and 

 these exercises are conducted by practition- 

 ers of medicine who devote a little time to 

 their duties as teachers, but give most of 

 their time and energy to their private in- 

 terests. As long as our medical schools 

 were private corporations founded partly 

 for the public good, but partly also for the 

 personal advancement of the members of 

 the corporation, this division of time was 

 natural and permissible. But our best 

 schools are no longer private enterprises; 

 they constitute a part of a university whose 

 functions are solely to advance the public 

 good and not in any sense to exploit pri- 

 vate interests. As has been well said by 

 one who speaks with great authority, the 

 university discharges its direct duties to 

 the public in two general ways, by teach- 

 ing and by investigating; by providing 

 systematic instruction in all forms of that 

 knowledge which has been accumulating 

 from the beginning of our race, and by 

 promoting all good methods for increasing 

 knowledge. These duties are performed 

 through her teachers. She therefore selects 

 her professore for their ability to teach 

 and to investigate, and to insure that these 

 functions are performed in the best possible 

 way they are required to devote them- 

 selves entirely to her service. In this re- 

 spect, as we know, the professors in the 

 clinical branches, and possibly also the pro- 

 fessors in some of the other professional 

 schools, are on a different plane from the 

 university professor proper. It is an in- 

 teresting, and it seems to me a perfectly 

 proper question to ask whether this distinc- 

 tion is a necessary and advantageous one. 

 Does it constitute an inherent character- 

 istic of professional instruction? This is 

 a somewhat delicate and complex ques- 

 tion which should be discussed not 



simply from the standpoint of the 

 ideal, but also with reference to what 

 is really feasible under conditions as 

 they exist. Time does not permit such a 

 discussion and I must limit myself to a 

 brief statement of what seem to me to be 

 the tendencies now developing. One curi- 

 ous, if not important, phase I may note in 

 passing, namely the practise that seems to 

 be growing of paying the clinical professor 

 the full salary given to the other professors 

 in the university. The professor in the 

 clinical subjects is designated as a pro- 

 fessor in the university, and although he is 

 permitted to engage in a lucrative private 

 business he is given a salary as large as 

 that paid to the usual professor who de- 

 votes his entire time to his university 

 duties. There is a manifest inequity in this 

 practise, and it produces a distinct feeling 

 of discontent among the teachers. It 

 would seem to me that the university ought 

 not to submit to this condition, unless it is 

 actually forced to do so to obtain the men 

 that it wants. As a matter of fact the in- 

 direct benefits attached to these positions 

 in a good university school are so great that 

 I believe there would never be difficulty in 

 obtaining the best men to fill them whether 

 they carried a salary or not. But if a sal- 

 ary is attached it should certainly not be 

 so large, under present conditions, as that 

 paid to other university professors, other- 

 wise the university deliberately places a 

 premium on the teaching done by the clin- 

 ical instructors which tends to discredit the 

 work of the other teachers. But this is a 

 more or less incidental matter. The really 

 important standpoint from which to view 

 the subject is what are the means by which 

 the university, through its medical depart- 

 ment, can discharge most efficiently its obli- 

 gations to the community. It wants to send 

 out practitioners of medicine qualified in 

 the best possible way to treat the sick, it 



