Pebruary 10, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



139 



and despite every kind of obstacle, and those 

 by S. Weir Mitchell, both entirely American 

 trained, nothing was accomplished toward the 

 development of the science. It should be 

 added, though, that both Beaumont and 

 Mitchell were influenced to some extent by the 

 progress in Europe. Interesting proof of this 

 is found in the marginal annotations in Beau- 

 mont's private copy of Magendie's "Summary 

 of Physiology," now a part of the Beaumont 

 collection in the library of the Washington 

 University School of Medicine. 



It is clear, then, that the more enlightened 

 of the American profession were not un- 

 familiar with European progress in medical 

 science. Many of them indeed had been 

 abroad, attracted mainly to the France of the 

 early nineteenth century by her prowess in 

 clinical medicine. But, with the exception of 

 Spain and possibly one or two of the smaller 

 European states, the United States has been 

 the slowest of the enlightened nations of the 

 world to participate in the scientific produc- 

 tivity of the modern era. For this tardiness a 

 number of factors seem to have been responsi- 

 ble. One of them, the main one, viz., the low 

 estate of medical education of the time, has 

 been mentioned. It is possible that preoccu- 

 pation with the affairs of a rapidly expanding 

 country, which gave little opportunity for 

 leisure, and the distractions centering around 

 the attempts to settle the institution of slavery, 

 culminating in the Civil War just about at the 

 time the peak of the progress in Europe was 

 being reached, also were factors. The influ- 

 ence of the Civil War in retarding progress is 

 indicated by the history of the first laboratory 

 for experimental medical research to be estab- 

 lished on this side of the water. Henry P. 

 Bowditch had just been graduated from Har- 

 vard College when the Civil War broke out. 

 Upon resigning from the army at the close 

 of the war he took up the study of medicine, 

 graduating in 1868, and then went abroad, 

 where he worked in the laboratory of Claude 

 Bernard, but especially in that of Carl 

 Ludwig. Immediately upon his return to this 

 country in 1871 he created the physiological 

 laboratory at Harvard. In the same year, it 

 might be added, Harvard instituted laboratory 



instruction, though not research, in histology 

 f.nd pathology. 



Five years elapsed before any further 

 progress in this direction was made. Then, in 

 1876, through the wise use of an opportunity 

 to make a wholly new start, there was estab- 

 lished the first institution in the country, the 

 Johns Hopkins University, to raise productive 

 scholarship in all of its departments to the 

 plane it occupied in European universities. 

 Newell Martin, Michael Foster's assistant at 

 Cambridge, primarily a physiologist, was 

 called from England to fill the chair in biology. 

 From this laboratory and from the laboratory 

 established at Harvard a considerable number 

 of physiologists and experimental biologists 

 have since gone forth, and through the 

 incentive of these two institutions physiological 

 laboratories were established in quick succes- 

 sion in the more progressive of the medical 

 schools of the country. 



Without running through the gamut of the 

 laboratories of the medical sciences that were 

 then established, it may be stated merely that 

 in the period extending from the introduction 

 of the scientific spirit into the study of medi- 

 cine at Harvard in 1871 down to the beginning 

 of the present century the more advanced of 

 the medical schools and especially those con- 

 nected with universities voluntarily filled their 

 chairs with men who were drawn into the work 

 by the spirit of research and who looked for- 

 ward hopefully to the future of their profes- 

 sion in their country. To this natural develop- 

 ment of the medical sciences there has more 

 recently been added a forced and rapid 

 growth, the result of propaganda for the eleva- 

 tion of standards conducted by the Council of 

 Medical Education of the American Medical 

 Association, by the Association of American 

 Medical Colleges, and by the General Educa- 

 tion Board through their reports on the status 

 of medical education made by Flexner, and 

 through the elevation by State Boards of 

 Medical Examiners of the requirements for ad- 

 mission to practice. Along with this develop- 

 ment of science departments, there has 

 occurred a great increase of interest in what 

 has come to be called the science of clinical 

 medicine, which Meltzer, its first exponent in 



