250 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. A'OL. SLYII. No. 1211 



rather austere. Never was a fancy more 

 completely and happily shattered. I can 

 just remember our meeting ; those who knew 

 Mall well will never forget how engagingly 

 he smiled. It was with one of the best of 

 his smiles that he greeted me. 



That event was the auspicious beginning 

 of a warm friendship which never wavered 

 until his death. Buring the first period 

 of half a dozen years we were in almost 

 daily ^eontact. Later, and after 1900, 

 when I left the medical school to enter the 

 University of Pennsylvania, our meetings 

 were at first not infrequent. I shall never 

 cease to regret the increasing intervals be- 

 tween them which followed my removal to 

 the Rockefeller Institute in New York. 

 Increasing responsibilities and enlarging 

 duties play havoc with one's life, and I 

 feel that I suffered a grievous and now 

 irremediaible loss in permitting those cir- 

 cumstances to cut me off to the extent it 

 seemed inevitable they should from asso- 

 ciation with Mall. To a certain extent, 

 letters took the place of personal contact. 

 Thus I kept more or less in touch with the 

 workings of his restless and <!onstructive 

 mind. 



It probably will strike few except his 

 very intimate friends that Mall was by 

 temperament a reformer. He was an un- 

 compromising democrat and hence enter- 

 tained the firmest belief in liberty in its 

 true and proper sense. Out of this in- 

 tensity of conviction arose the views ex- 

 pressed in conversation more frequently 

 but not more forcibly than in his addresses, 

 on full opportunity and freedom in uni- 

 versity education, both in its pre-graduate 

 and post-graduate aspects. His compre- 

 hending and incisive mind was the first, I 

 believe, to appreciate and afterwards to 

 propound that the best of medical edu- 

 cational institutions were half-hearted 

 affairs. That part of the institutions which 



a quarter of a century earlier had been 

 the weakest — the laboratory branches 

 namely — had been immeasurably strength- 

 ened in that short period, during which the 

 previously stronger part — namely the 

 clinical branches — had progressed rela- 

 tively little. The balance could be struck 

 and must be, even though in the process 

 the old system were, if need be, completely 

 shattered, as much shattered indeed as had 

 been the earlier hybrid combined laboratoiy 

 and clinical chairs. Out of this conception 

 which Mall propounded, I am almost in- 

 clined to say preached to us persistently, 

 arose the present movement, ever gaining 

 force and strength until it has now become 

 almost irresistible in favor of full-time 

 clinical professorships. 



It is very interesting to consider just 

 here the extent to which he used others, 

 converts or disciples as they may be called, 

 to diffuse more broadly his reforming 

 ideas. One would search Mall's miscel- 

 laneous papers, of which indeed there are 

 notably few, in vain for an exhaustive 

 presentation of the case for the full-time 

 clinical plan. The wide dissemination of 

 the idea by the printed page was left to 

 others, while he maintained the high level 

 of conviction in those coming under his 

 immediate influence by an irresistible fund 

 of logical exposition. 



In his delightful essay on his master, 

 Wilheka His, MaU reveals his attitude 

 toward higher education in its various 

 complex aspects. I wonder how many re- 

 turned foreign students have kept up an 

 intimate correspondence with a revered 

 teacher extending over a long period of 

 time, like that disclosed by Mall in this 

 essay. The ex:tracts from his letters there 

 published show how well the older man 

 comprehended the younger, as the spirit 

 and substance of the essay shows how 

 the younger man admired and appreciated 



