SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 601. 



the problems pertaining to this disease. 



It may also be noted that the Carnegie 

 Institution in Washington, with its un- 

 equaled endowment of ten million dollars, 

 includes within its scope the support of 

 biological and chemical investigations of 

 great importance to medical science, so 

 that our country now stands in line with 

 Germany, France and Great Britain in the 

 opportunities afforded for research in 

 medical and other sciences. 



These various institutions have been men- 

 tioned as typifying the general aims and 

 character of the E-ockefeller Institute for 

 Medical Research, rather than to afford any 

 complete picture of the material aid now 

 available for the advancement of scientific 

 medicine. If the latter were the purpose, 

 it would be necessary to travel far afield 

 so as to include independent medical labo- 

 ratories of more restricted scope, such as 

 those for the study of cancer, the labora- 

 tories connected with departments of 

 health, so well exemplified in our own 

 country by those of the state board of 

 health of Massachusetts, and of the de- 

 partment of health of the city of New 

 York, hospitals and the laboratories con- 

 nected with them, the medical laboratories 

 of the universities and medical schools, 

 such as the Thompson Yates and Johnston 

 laboratories in Liverpool, and the splendid 

 new laboratories of the Harvard Medical 

 School, laboratories established in recent 

 years for the study of tropical diseases, 

 such as our government laboratories in 

 Manila, and funds available for special 

 grants to investigators. 



Impressive and encouraging as is this 

 lemarkable growth within recent years of 

 laboratories devoted to the medical sciences, 

 no one who has any knowledge of the vast 

 field to be covered, of the difficulty and 

 complexity of the problems, of the expendi- 

 ture of money required, and of the returns 

 in increased knowledge and benefits to 



mankind which have been attained and 

 which may be expected in increasing meas- 

 ure, can for a moment suppose that the 

 existing opportunities, considerable as they 

 are, are adequate to meet the present and 

 the future needs of scientific medicine. 



As I have already stated, the wider rec- 

 ognition of medical science as a rewarding 

 object of endowment is a result of dis- 

 coveries made during the last quarter of a 

 century, and it is of interest to inquire 

 why this increased knowledge should have 

 borne such abundant fruit. The result is 

 not due to any change in the ultimate aims 

 of medicine, which have always been what 

 they are to-day and will remain, the pre- 

 vention and the cure of disease, nor to the 

 application to the solution of medical prob- 

 lems of any higher intellectual ability and 

 skill, than were possessed by physicians of 

 past generations, nor to the growth of the 

 scientific spirit, nor to the mere fact of a 

 great scientific advance in medicine, for 

 the most important contribution ever made 

 to our understanding of the processes of 

 disease was the discovery by Virchow, in 

 the middle of the last century, of the prin- 

 ciples and facts of cellular pathology, the 

 foundation of modern pathology. 



The awakening of this wider public in- 

 terest in scientific medicine is attributable 

 mainly to the opening of new paths of in- 

 vestigation which have led to a deeper and 

 more helpful insight into the nature and 

 the modes of prevention of a group of dis- 

 eases — the infectious diseases — which stand 

 in a more definite and intimate relation to 

 the social, moral and physical well-being 

 of mankind than any other class of dis- 

 eases. The problems of infection which 

 have been solved, and kindred ones which 

 give promise of solution, are among the 

 most important relating to human society. 

 The dangers arising from the spread of 

 contagious and other infectious diseases, 

 threaten, not the individual only, but in- 



