January 3, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



11 



pelled to raise their standards, the moral 

 pressure exerted through an awakened 

 sentiment for reform on the part of the 

 organized profession and the better schools, 

 closer union between medical school and 

 university and the consequent interest of 

 university teachers and authorities in the 

 problems of medical education, the ex- 

 ample set by a few schools of a high order, 

 endowment— although very inadequate — of 

 medical education, which formerly was 

 almost wholly neglected as an object in 

 need or worthy of private or public bene- 

 ficence, the advancement of medical sci- 

 ence and art, necessitating improved 

 methods and higher standards of profes- 

 sional training, and a juster and wider ap- 

 preciation of the significance of curative 

 and preventive medicine to the welfare of 

 the community. 



The history of medical education in 

 America is still in the making, but we now 

 have a number of schools with high 

 standards and adequate equipment capable 

 of giving to students of medicine a pro- 

 fessional education as good as that to be ob- 

 tained in European universities. The best 

 and most progressive schools are those in 

 organic union with a university, and it 

 seems clear that to schools of this type 

 belongs the future of higher medical educa- 

 tion in this country. Nearly twenty years 

 ago in an address at Yale University I en- 

 deavored to set forth the advantages of the 

 union of medical school and university, 

 and, as addresses, fortunately for those in 

 the habit of giving them, are soon for- 

 gotten, I shall here summarize what I con- 

 ceive to be the more prominent of these 



Of all professional and technical schools 

 the medical, vnth its requirements for 

 laboratories, hospitals and teaching force, 

 is the most costly. A medical department 

 of a university is much more likely to be 

 the recipient of endowment funds than an 



independent school, and the university is a 

 safer and more suitable custodian of such 

 funds. 



In manifold ways the environment of a 

 university is that best adapted to the teach- 

 ing and the advancement of medicine. 

 The medical school needs the ideals of the 

 university in maintaining the dignity of its 

 high calling, in laying a broad foundation 

 for professional study, in applying correct 

 educational principles in the arrangement 

 of the curriculum and in methods of in- 

 struction, in assigning the proper place and 

 share to the scientific and the practical 

 studies, in giving due emphasis to both the 

 teaching and the investigating sides of its 

 work, in stimulating productive research, 

 and in determining what shall be the quali- 

 fications of its teachers and of the recip- 

 ients of its degree. Most invigorating is 

 the contact of medical teachers and investi- 

 gators with workers in those sciences on 

 which medicine is dependent— chemistry, 

 physics and biology. 



In the selection of teachers— a matter of 

 the first importance— a university is in a 

 superior position to secure the best avail- 

 able men wherever they can be found, re- 

 gardless of any other consideration than 

 fitness. Too often this choice has been de- 

 termined in our medical schools by irrele- 

 vant influences and considerations and an 

 outlook upon the world scarcely more than 

 parochial in extent. 



In the difficult matter of adjustment of 

 professional training to conditions of col- 

 legiate education peculiar to our country 

 there are manifest advantages in the union 

 of medical school with university, espe- 

 cially where the periods of liberal and of 

 professional study are made to overlap. 

 Where the sciences adjuvant to medicine, 

 as general chemistry, physics, zoology and 

 botany, are included in the medical cur- 

 riculum, as is done in the German and 

 French universities, it is economical and 



