18 



SCIENCE 



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



thing we have been too busy setting our 

 houses in order for their primary uses in 

 the training of students to have given the 

 requisite attention to other questions which, 

 however important, may have seemed for 

 the moment less urgent. With the degree 

 of emphasis thus placed on the educational 

 side teaching gifts rather than investiga- 

 ting capacity have been sought as the most 

 desirable qualification of professors in our 

 medical schools. The power of imparting 

 knowledge, gained second-hand, fluently 

 and even skilfully, is not an uncommon 

 gift and is possessed by many who have 

 never engaged in research and have no 

 especial inclination or aptitude for it, but 

 the teaching of him who has questioned 

 Nature and received her answers has often, 

 and I think commonly, in spite it may be 

 of defects of delivery, a rarer and more 

 inspiring quality. 



A medical school or university can not 

 expect to fill all of its chairs with men with 

 the genius for discovery — if it has one or 

 two it has a treasure beyond all price— but 

 every effort should be made to secure as 

 occupants of these chairs from among those 

 who are available, wherever they can be 

 found, the ones who have demonstrated the 

 greatest capacity to advance knowledge by 

 original investigation and the ability to 

 stimulate research. Until this principle is 

 more fully and generally recognized and 

 acted on in the selection of heads of de- 

 partments, our medical schools as a class 

 will not become important contributors to 

 knowledge. It is not enough that a few 

 schools should encourage and provide for 

 original investigation; the field must be a 

 wide one in order to attract many to a sci- 

 entific career, for of the many only a few 

 will be found endowed with the power of 

 discovery. There is no possible way of 

 recognizing the possessor of this power be- 

 fore he has demonstrated it. Even when a 

 university has succeeded in attaching to it 



those who can conduct scientific inquiry 

 successfully, how often are their energies 

 sapped by lack of adequate resources and 

 enough trained assistants and by too great 

 burden of teaching and administrative 

 work imposed on them ! 



It is evident from what has been said, 

 and indeed it has been a tacit assumption 

 throughout this address, that, while with 

 present resources considerable improve- 

 ment in medical education in this country 

 is possible, further progress is largely a 

 question of ways and means. What makes 

 modern medical education so costly is pre- 

 cisely its practical character, necessitating 

 laboratories and hospitals, and it can be 

 made self-supporting no more than any 

 other department of higher education. For 

 reasons already stated, the medical depart- 

 ments of strong universities are the ones 

 most likely to receive the funds needed for 

 the support of medical education and are 

 in general the most desesrving. There is 

 a great future before the medical schools 

 of many of our state universities, which 

 are already developing with such promise 

 and are sure to receive in increasing meas- 

 ure aid from the state as their needs and 

 the benefits accruing to the community 

 from their generous support are more and 

 more fully appreciated. Other universi- 

 ties must look to private endowment, and 

 I have endeavored to show that they 

 should foster their departments of medicine 

 as zealously as their other faculties. The 

 university chest should be opened, so far as 

 possible, to supply needs of the medical 

 school, and authorities of the university 

 should present the claims of medical educa- 

 tion to financial aid as among the most im- 

 portant in their domain, and they can do so 

 to-day with a force of appeal not possible a 

 quarter of a century ago. President Eliot, 

 whose services to the cause of medical edu- 

 cation are great, in his address at the open- 

 ing of the new buildings of the Harvard 



