June 14, 1901.] 
tecedents, entirely ‘ reject the accumulated 
experience of the profession,’ nor can it be 
said that, in a sectarian sense, they any 
longer possess an excuse for existence. 
Their graduates, or such of them as do not 
base practice on an exclusive dogma, are, 
in many instances, met in formal consulta- 
tion by even conservative regular physi- 
cians, and, in more than one instance, are 
made members of medical societies that are 
in affiliation with the American Medical 
Association. 
The Illinois State Medical Society, which 
has always been among the foremost in re- . 
form movements within the profession, at 
its recent annual session, unanimously 
‘Resolved, That the school of graduation 
shall be no bar to membership in the Illi- 
nois State Medical Society, providing such 
physician is recognized by the local socie- 
ties as qualified and not claiming to practice 
any exclusive system of medicine.” 
The Ohio State Medical Society, by pre- 
cedent, if not by formal action, established 
the same rule. 
We thus see that the proscriptive rule 
which, during the more than twenty-five 
years of its dominance, propagated the very 
evils it was intended to correct, is rapidly 
expiring by limitation in the face of new 
conditions that have been induced, in spite 
of it, by beneficent and catholic legislation. 
In the State of New York alone the annual 
registration of sectarian physicians has di- 
minished nearly ninety per cent. under the 
operation of its present laws. 
of Ohio many physicans who are graduates 
of sectarian schools are making application 
to have their classification on the register 
changed to ‘regular,’ while equal reactionary 
movements are observable in other States. 
Thus we observe the passing of homeop- 
athy and electicism, just as did the calm 
scientists of Rome witness the passing of the 
‘humoralism,’ the ‘ Methodism,’ the ‘ elec- 
ticism,’ and the ‘ pneumatic school’ of that 
SCIENCE. 
Tn the State 
935 
period ; and just as passed the ‘ chemical- 
ism,’ the ‘iatro-physical school,’ the ‘ iatro- 
chemical school,’ and the ‘ brunonianism ’ 
and the dozen other ‘isms’ of later epochs, 
each leaving its little modicum of truth as 
the memento of its existence. And let us 
felicitate ourselves that, with the passing of 
the particular sectarianism of the last cen- 
tury, there is also the passing of its con- 
comitant evils, such as existed in even 
greater degree in the time of Galen, who 
‘found the medical profession of his time 
split up into a number of sects, medical 
science confounded under a multitude of 
dogmatic systems,’ and, as if relating the 
effect of the cause, the historian continues, 
‘the social status and the moral integrity 
of the physician degraded.’ The further 
results of this new order of things, how- 
ever, are observable, not alone in the modi- 
fied curricula of the medical schools, but 
in the changed organic relations of the in- 
stitutions themselves. Under the pressure 
of legal requirements the weight falls with 
almost fatal foree upon the small, private 
and poorly equipped institutions. These 
institutions, in the interest of self-preserva- 
tion and to protect a respectable alumni, 
are forced either to expand their enterprises 
or to seek relations with universities which 
are deeply founded in the community ; or 
else actually to go out of existence. The 
majority of the schools seek connection with 
the universities, by which step alone they 
become logical objects for endowment, and 
it is to be hoped that this movement will 
continue until in this great country medical 
education shall be as firmly established as 
it is to-day in any of the transatlantic 
nations. 
Another of the new conditions which has 
developed within the last quarter of a cen- 
tury, as the result of an increasing profes- 
sional unity, is the efficient sanitary regula- 
tions, national, State and municipal, that. 
now afford protection to the people from 
