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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 679 



highly desirable that they should be taught 

 in the collegiate or philosophical faculty 

 rather than that separate provision should 

 be made for them in the medical faculty, 

 where they do not properly belong. 



The benefits of union of medical school 

 and university are reciprocal, and not to 

 the medical school alone. A good medical 

 faculty, properly supported and equipped, 

 is a source of strength and of renown to the 

 university possessing it, and its work in 

 training students and in extending the 

 boundaries of knowledge greatly increases 

 the usefulness of the university to the com- 

 munity. Nor is there anything in this 

 work which does not appertain to the 

 proper functions of a university, however 

 high its ideals. Indeed I venture to assert 

 that the present and prospective state of 

 medicine and its relations to the well-being 

 of individual man and of human society 

 are such that there is no higher or nobler 

 function of a university than the teaching 

 of the nature of disease and how it may be 

 cured and prevented, and the advancement 

 of the knowledge on which this conquest 

 of disease depends. If it be said that the 

 medical art is largely empiric, I reply that 

 this, while true, does not make medicine 

 unworthy of shelter in the university. The 

 empiric method of diseoveiy by trial and 

 error has its glorious triumphs as well as 

 the scientific and is not to be disdained. 

 To it we owe such beneficial discoveries as 

 the curative properties of quinine in ma- 

 laria, vaccination against smallpox and the 

 anesthetic uses of ether and chloroform. 



But there is a scientific as well as an 

 empiric side to medicine and the distinctive 

 feature of modei*n medicine is the rapid 

 extension of the former and the curtail- 

 ment of the latter. The fundamental 

 medical sciences— anatomy, physiology, 

 physiological chemistry, pathology, phar- 

 macology, bacteriology and hygiene— are 

 rapidly advancing and important depart- 



ments of biological science, which have 

 contributed and wiU continue to contribute 

 enormously to the progress of practical 

 medicine. In an address which I had the 

 honor to deliver somewhat over ten years 

 ago at the dedication of the Hull Biolog- 

 ical Laboratories of this university I took 

 occasion to dwell with some detail upon the 

 biological aspects of medicine. 



We should add to the specialized medical 

 sciences already mentioned the study of the 

 problems presented by the living patient in 

 hospitals and laboratories attached to hos- 

 pital clinics where chemical, physical and 

 biological methods can be applied to the 

 investigation of clinical problems, which do 

 not fall within the scope of other labora- 

 tories or can be less advantageously at- 

 tacked in them. These clinical investiga- 

 ting laboratories are an important addition 

 to the older analytical and statistical meth- 

 ods of study of disease and mark an ad- 

 vance from which valuable results have 

 been obtained and more valuable ones are 

 to be expected. It is highly desirable that 

 our medical clinics should be organized 

 with regard to this newer direction of work, 

 for which they will require considerable 

 funds. 



The science of medicine has advanced in 

 recent years more rapidly than the art and 

 in its various branches it constitutes to-day 

 a field of work most alluring and most re- 

 warding to the properly trained scientific 

 investigator, Avho, if he have the rare genius 

 for discovery, may reap a harvest rich in 

 blessing to mankind. 



But the art of medicine has profited 

 greatly by the application of scientific dis- 

 coveries. The physician and the surgeon 

 to-day can do far more in the relief of 

 physical suffering and in the successful 

 treatment of disease and injury than was 

 formerly possible, but the great triumphs 

 have been in the field of preventive medi- 

 cine. The hoi'izon of the average man's 



