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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1211 



which might even, when provoked, heeome 

 a liMe biting. It took time and some skill 

 to penetrate an outer film of reserve which 

 arose from innate modesty and shyness, 

 but once beneath that protective covering, 

 one readily discovered in him a simple, 

 idealistic and gifted person of many sides, 

 possessed of an almost miraculous power 

 to stimulate students to put forth their 

 best efforts. His memory and example 

 will long survive in the achievements of 

 his students and associates, in the broad 

 ideas which he disseminated, and in the 

 admiration and affection which he inspired. 



Simon Flexnee 

 The Rockefelleb Institute 

 FOE Medical Eesearch 



FRANKLIN PAINE MALL: A REVIEW 

 OF HIS SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVE- 

 MENT! 

 To those who are familiar with the his- 

 tory of medicine in this country, it is a 

 matter of common knowledge that at the 

 time Dr. Mall began his career, thirty years 

 ago, anatomy in America had no scientific 

 standing — a mere tool of surgery with but 

 a single method, that of dissection. He 

 left it where it must be in any community 

 where medicine is progressive, one of its 

 greatest sciences. He left it richly endowed 

 with technical methods, a science so truly 

 fundamental that workers in every other 

 branch of medicine are constantly and in- 

 creasingly returning to it, both for methods 

 and for results. The vision of this change 

 must have been his while he was yet a stu- 

 dent for he wrote in one of his letters : 



My aim is to make seientifle medicine a life 

 work. If opportunities present, I will. This has 

 been my plan ever since I left America and not 

 until of late (since having received encouragement) 



1 Address given at a meeting in memory of 

 Franklin Paine Mall held at the Johns Hopkins 

 University, February 3, 1918. 



have I expressed myself. I shall no doubt meet 

 many stumbling blocks, but they are anticipated. 



Sweeping aside the traditions of the dis- 

 secting room, he first created conditions 

 under which this change could develop, and 

 then devoted himself to scientific achieve- 

 ment and to the type of teaching in which 

 he was profoundly interested. It was one 

 of his oft-repeated maxims that the best and 

 perhaps the only great way to teach is by 

 example. "With the ideal of scientific work 

 as his goal, he has left us an example so 

 rich in ideas, so varied in technical meth- 

 ods and so representative of the range of 

 anatomy and embryology, that a study of 

 his work is both an inspiration and an edu- 

 cation. 



His first undertaking in the field of re- 

 search serves well to illustrate his inde- 

 pendence of thought which, to those who 

 knew him, was most striking. During the 

 winter of 1885 he began his scientific work 

 under His at Leipzig, who gave to him a 

 problem connected with the gill-arches in 

 the chick. In this study he came to the con- 

 clusion, now generally held, that the 

 thymus arises from the endoderm of the 

 pharynx, notwithstanding the fact that His 

 held the view that it came from ectoderm. 

 This work was given to His as Dr. Mall was 

 leaving for Baltimore and was accepted 

 for publication. In the next number of the 

 journal of which His was editor, there ap- 

 peared a second communication from the 

 latter, strengthening his own point of view, 

 but announcing that a different opinion 

 would be published by one of his pupils in 

 the next number. "When Dr. Mall's article 

 appeared, it was with a damaging footnote 

 by His, to the effect that the independent 

 character of the results was obvious. Two 

 years later His restudied the region in a 

 human embryo and found that Dr. Mall's 

 conclusions were correct. He gave due ac- 

 knowledgment of this in an open letter to 



