122 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. JSIo. 630 



me in Baltimore, and of their contributions 

 to anatomy. 



More than a century ago the status of 

 anatomy in America compared favorably 

 with that in Europe, but the degeneration 

 of medical education which followed rapid- 

 ly and successfully pushed anatomy into 

 an inferior position. This decay in med- 

 ical instruction reached in America as low 

 a level as the civilized world has perhaps 

 ever seen about the time of our civil war. 

 At this period the chair of anatomy was 

 almost always used as a stepping-stone to 

 that of surgery and under these conditions 

 the quality of the teaching was rarely good. 

 A certain type of surgical anatomy devel- 

 oped from this combination and but very 

 few contributions to the science were made. 

 Too often, however, there was a mere ex- 

 ploitation of the chair of anatomy, the 

 teaching was poor, and the practical work 

 in the dissecting room was neglected. Since 

 then there has been a gradual improvement 

 in medical education, due largely to the 

 cultivation of its underlying sciences. Dur- 

 ing all those dark years, however, there was 

 one place in which the light of anatomy 

 shone continuously; thither Caspar Wistar 

 carried it and there the Wistar Institute is 

 located. 



Caspar Wistar, the second professor of 

 anatomy at the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, did much to perpetuate the good 

 traditions of Benjamin Franklin, John 

 Morgan and William Shippen. He was a 

 man of great influence, took a lively in- 

 terest in natural history, and made many 

 anatomical specimens, some of which may 

 still be seen in the Wistar Institute. He 

 wrote an excellent text-book of anatomy, 

 which was used by many students. He 

 was succeeded first by Physick and then 

 by Horner, who made a number of impor- 

 tant discoveries in anatomy. Horner was 

 followed by Dr. Leidy, who held the chair 

 for nearly forty years. During all these 



years the chair of anatomy became notably 

 conspicuous on account of the luster shed 

 upon it by the eminence of its occupants. 

 The greatest of this brilliant group was 

 Leidy, in fact he was the greatest teacher 

 of anatomy to medical students this coun- 

 try has seen. His ideals were of the high- 

 est and his scientific discoveries were nu- 

 merous and accurate, contributing much to 

 comparative anatomy and zoology. The 

 good influence he exerted upon the various 

 institutions in Philadelphia has been ex- 

 tended over the nation through this asso- 

 ciation, of which he was one of the found- 

 ers. It is also fitting, and by no means 

 accidental, that the Wistar Institute is lo- 

 cated in Philadelphia. Few, perhaps, are 

 aware of what has really taken place at this 

 great foundation for scientific anatomy. 

 Thanks largely to the far-seeing policy of 

 its present director, Dr. Greenman, the first 

 division of its staff has been manned by the 

 ablest investigators in neurology, and the 

 Institute has been made the central insti- 

 tution for America by the Commission for 

 Brain Investigation appointed by the In- 

 ternational Association of Academies. I 

 sincerely hope that our society will give 

 full support to the Wistar Institute, for its 

 work will be national as well as interna- 

 tional. 



On account of the low ebb of medical 

 education at the period mentioned a cer- 

 tain dividing of the ways occurred, best 

 illustrated, perhaps, by what happened at 

 Harvard. At this college there fortunate- 

 ly appeared the ablest anatomist this coun- 

 try has yet produced, but the Medical 

 School saw fit to duplicate his chair for 

 reasons that are not clear to me. There 

 existed in Harvard College and Harvard 

 Medical School, side by side, Jeffrys Wy- 

 man, the scientific anatomist, with but few 

 students, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 

 poet anatomist, with many of them. This 

 unwise arrangement, it seems to me, de- 



