138 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1415 



placed the private laboratories that were usu- 

 ally conducted merely to satisfy an avocation. 

 The pupils of Miiller and their contemporaries, 

 in charge of these laboratories, soon attracted 

 to them the attention of the world, and med- 

 ical students flocked to work in them as they 

 once had to Italy during the revival there. 



Though the spread of modern scientific 

 medicine for the most part can thus be traced 

 either directly or indirectly from Germany, 

 sight should not be lost of the fact that in all 

 of the more enlightened countries of the world 

 the spark of independent genius has ever con- 

 tinued to add by its own methods to the realm 

 of knowledge. There never has been a more 

 brilliant worker in physiology than Claude 

 Bernard, the pupil and successor of Magendie; 

 and 'the story of the rapid sequence of Pas- 

 teur's brilliant discoveries in science ever of 

 crucial importance and establishing a new 



principle, has no parallel in biology, 



or, for that matter, any other science" 

 (Pearee). Furthermore, though the start was 

 made in Germany, in some localities the 

 transplanted method has led to a growth that 

 has been quite as splendid as in the land of its 

 original cultivation. This is true, for example, 

 of the development of physiologj' in England 

 (Hopkins). 



In the United States, with which the rest of 

 this paper deals, a beginning was made in 

 medical science before the dawn of the classical 

 period of the modern development in Ger- 

 many, and the start was quite auspicious. 

 Just before the American Revolution medical 

 schools began to be founded in connection 

 with universities; with the College of Phila- 

 delphia in 1765; with King's College in 1768; 

 and somewhat later with Harvard, 1783 ; Dart- 

 mouth, 1798, Yale, 1810, and Transylvania, 

 1817. The model of these schools was the 

 medical department of the University of 

 Edinburgh, which in turn represented a devel- 

 opment of the idea of the great Italian univer- 

 sities, handed down through the Dutch univer- 

 sity of Leyden (Welch). 



These schools were founded by men who 

 had received their training mainly in the pro- 

 prietary schools of London and in the Univer- 

 sity of Edinburgh. Of the medical sciences 



descriptive anatomy alone was cultivated. 

 Apparently the contact which many of the 

 teachers in these schools had had with that 

 master of experimentation, John Hunter, and 

 with Charles Bell failed to transmit the spark; 

 for they contributed nothing to the develop- 

 ment of experimental medicine. The reason 

 for this seems to have been that whatever of 

 the scientific spirit these pioneer university 

 schools may have had was soon crushed out 

 through competition with the great crop of 

 private schools of anatomy and of proprietary 

 schools of medicine that grew up about them. 

 In the absence of any guiding spirit prac- 

 tically all schools became commercial enter- 

 prises, conducted rather for the professional 

 reputation and pecuniary benefit of their 

 faculties than with a view to training good 

 physicians or to advancing the science of 

 medicine. There were, to be sure, exceptions to 

 this rule. Some proprietary schools were 

 founded by high minded men and were main- 

 tained for the purpose of supplying well 

 trained physicians to a rapidly expanding 

 country which was neither rich enough nor 

 settled enough to support university schools 

 properly so called. An outstanding example 

 was the so-called Medical Fund Society, the 

 holding corporation of the St. Louis Medical 

 College, now the Washington University 

 School of Medicine, through whose devotion 

 and self sacrifice the St. Louis Medical Col- 

 lege eventually came to be supplied with a 

 permanent endowment, and was enabled to 

 become one of the first medical schools west 

 of the Atlantic seaboard to establish a scien- 

 tific laboratory (under W. T. Porter in 1886). 

 But even the more ethical of these schools, 

 dependent, as they were, almost entirely upon 

 fees from students, failed to supply the ele- 

 ments that are necessary to lead any but a 

 self sacrificing genius to interest himself in 

 and devote himself to medical science. 



In consequence of these conditions, follow- 

 ing the American Revolution and for a period 

 of almost 100 years medical science in the 

 United States rather receded than advanced. 

 Excepting certain individual and for the most 

 part casual contributions, such, for example, 

 as those by Beaumont, made in the back woods 



