32 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLV. No. 1150 



requires at times no little self-restraint to 

 withhold an apparent innovation for 

 greater certainty. Over-enthusiasm greets 

 the advent of every fact that has the least 

 suggestion of practical value. We have 

 ourselves lived through successive eras in 

 medical progress when from each group of 

 specialists was expected the last unraveling 

 of the human mystery. Morphologist, 

 physiologist, bacteriologist, and biochemist 

 has each had his turn. The ultimate truth 

 lies in all these sciences, and again in no 

 one of them alone. The danger to sober 

 advance is not in the successive enthu- 

 siasms with which each specialty has been 

 received, but in the dabbling methods of 

 a group of investigators who have at- 

 tempted to "follow the ball" ; investigating 

 a given medical problem in successive years 

 by the latest method in vogue, becoming 

 rapidly in turn pathologist, physiologist, 

 chemist. 



The ultimate solution of each medical 

 problem lies in the combined attack of a 

 group of investigators converging from dif- 

 ferent points of the scientific compass, each 

 trained in a separate method and employ- 

 ing it intensively. The problem of cancer, 

 for example, is now being studied by the 

 morphologist who describes hitherto undif- 

 ferentiated structures in the malignant cell 

 by special staining methods; by the im- 

 munologist who demonstrates the presence 

 of reaction bodies in the serum of can- 

 cerous animals and human beings; by the 

 chemist who shows that certain substances 

 given parenterally inhibit or stimulate cell 

 growth, or who produces similar results by 

 the use of various diets ; and by the expert 

 in vital statistics who shows the actual in- 

 crease or decrease in incidence of the dis- 

 ease; by the biologist who shows in Men- 

 delian tables the heredity of the disease in 

 animals ; or, again, the effect of cross-breed- 

 ing on transmission of the tumor; and by 



the physicist who demonstrates the effect 

 on the tumor growth of X-rays or radium. 

 I have not exhausted the category, but 

 merely wish to indicate that the significant 

 advances in each of these methods of ap- 

 proach are made by specialists. Do not 

 misunderstand me to mean that any one of 

 these investigators may not be led by his 

 work to assume seriously and purposefully 

 the activities of any other type. Pasteur 

 was a chemist who became a biologist and 

 probably the greatest contributor to medi- 

 cine, although without medical training, 

 because he followed his problem to the bit- 

 ter end into whatever field it led, with little 

 regard for the fact that he was, technically 

 speaking, unfit to encroach on medical ter- 

 ritory. He rediscovered medicine from a 

 new angle, untrammeled by any precon- 

 ceived notions of how disease was regarded. 

 Ignorance of veterinary medicine did not 

 prevent him from isolating the causative 

 agent of anthrax in cattle and from utiliz- 

 ing an attenuated virus in its prevention. 

 Failure to have studied the central nervous 

 system of man was no obstacle to the man 

 who discovered the essential cause of hy- 

 drophobia and the means of preventing it. 

 Imagine insisting that Pasteur's curricu- 

 lum should have included medicine as a 

 necessary prerequisite to the discovery of 

 the fundamental principles of the infec- 

 tious diseases. 



I hope you will not take my remarks as 

 indicating anything but the highest appre- 

 ciation of instruction in the sciences in gen- 

 eral as the best training for the youthful 

 mind, or as contributive to general culture. 

 You will not accuse me of advocating early 

 vocational training without a preliminary 

 survey of the realm of knowledge. To be 

 specific, you will not imagine that I dis- 

 credit the now universal requirements that 

 premedical students should acquire a 

 modicum of chemistry, of physics, and of 



