OCTOBEB 12, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



455 



Warren, who as surgeon, writer and teacher 

 has so worthily maintained and enhanced 

 the ancestral fame. 



The Harvard Medical School has been a 

 pioneer in this country in many improve- 

 ments of medical education; it has stood 

 successfully in an historic city and com- 

 monwealth for high standards of profes- 

 sional attainment and honor and for just 

 recognition of the dignity and usefulness 

 of the profession; it has made valuable 

 contributions to the advancement of med- 

 ical knowledge and practise, and above all 

 there issued from this school and the 

 Massachusetts General Hospital through 

 John Collins Warren, the elder, and 

 Samuel G. Morton medicine's supreme gift 

 to suffering humanity of surgical an- 

 esthesia. 



This school, however, has no possession 

 so valuable or which gives such assurance 

 of its stability and growth for untold gen- 

 erations to come and of .the worthy be- 

 stowal of the great gifts which were dedi- 

 cated yesterday as its union with Harvard 

 University, and it is befitting that the sig- 

 nificance of this university relationship 

 should be emphasized by including among 

 the dedicatory ceremonies this academic 

 function in the halls of this great uni- 

 versity. 



The severance of the historical union of 

 medical school and university, leading to 

 the establishment of a multitude of inde- 

 pendent medical schools without responsi- 

 ble control and usurping the right to con- 

 fer the doctor's degree and the license to 

 practise, is accountable in large measure 

 for the low position to which medical edu- 

 cation in this country sank during the 

 larger part of the last century, and from 

 which it has now risen in our better schools 

 to a height which we can contemplate with 

 increasing satisfaction. Nor would it be 

 difficult to show, if this were the suitable 



occasion, that our universities on their side 

 have suffered from the loss of a member 

 which has brought renown to many foreign 

 universities and that many of the embar- 

 rassing anomalies of our collegiate system 

 of education are due to lack of personal 

 contact, on the part of colleges and uni- 

 versities, with the needs of professional, 

 especially medical, training. There is of 

 course no saving grace in a merely nominal 

 connection of medical school and univer- 

 sity ; the union to be of mutual benefit must 

 be a real and vital one; ideals of the uni- 

 versity must inspire the whole life and 

 activities of the medical department. 



To have recognized fully from the be- 

 ginning of his administration the impor- 

 tance of this vitalizing union of the med- 

 ical school with the university, to have 

 striven patiently with full grasp of the 

 problems and with intelligent sympathy 

 with the needs of medicine for the uplift- 

 ing of the standards of medical education, 

 and, with the aid of his medical colleagues, 

 to have planted these standards where they 

 now are in the Harvard Medical School is 

 not the least of the many enduring services 

 which President Eliot has rendered to 

 American education, and, in behalf of our 

 profession, I wish to make to you, sir, on 

 this occasion grateful acknowledgment of 

 this great and beneficent work. 



The opening of the new laboratories of 

 the Harvard Medical School marks the cul- 

 mination, up to the present time, of an 

 educational and scientific movement which 

 has been the most distinctive character- 

 istic of the development of medicine during 

 the past fifty years and which has trans- 

 formed the face of modern medicine. To 

 have some idea of the extent and the direc- 

 tion of this development consider how in- 

 conceivable would have been the mere ex- 

 istence of such laboratories a century ago, 

 and how impossible it would have been 



