Apru. 17, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



605 



to books and scientific journals, especially 

 "when a director, who can give his whole 

 time to teaching and research and is filled 

 with the enthusiasm of his subject, leads 

 the way. Later on, in Berlin, Johannes 

 Miiller did for physiology what Liebig had 

 done for chemistry, and many of the physi- 

 ological chairs in European universities 

 were filled subsequently by men who had 

 worked under Miiller. 



It goes without saying that laboratory 

 buildings alone, even when adequately 

 equipped and with a liberal maintenance 

 budget, are far less important than the 

 men who work in them. Nevertheless, ex- 

 perience teaches that in cities and countries 

 where the laboratory facilities are most 

 ample there, on the whole, more and better 

 men apply for training, and a greater num- 

 ber of important discoveries are made. 



An obstacle in the way of laboratory 

 expansion has been the great cost of such 

 institutions. While the buildings them- 

 selves are not necessarily very expensive, 

 still the outfit needed often entails a large 

 outlay, and unless the director and his as- 

 sistants are paid sufficient salaries to per- 

 mit them to devote all or almost all their 

 time and energies to the work but little 

 progress is likely to be made. Moreover, 

 the expense of supplies for the experi- 

 mental work in such laboratories is great 

 and a liberal annual budget is therefore 

 an essential. The scientific workers, too, 

 should be provided with a certain number 

 of paid mechanical helpers, for where the 

 best brains in the laboratory are hampered 

 by the necessity of doing the work which 

 could just as well be done by laboratory 

 servants a serious economic mistake is 

 made. 



The endowment necessary for modern 

 laboratories has been one of the main fac- 

 tors in leading to the disappearance of 

 proprietary medical schools, since a med- 

 ical school conducted by modern methods 



can no longer be run for profit. Indeed, 

 large sums of money are absolutely neces- 

 sary for the conduct of modern medical 

 education, and unless these endowments are 

 available through private benefaction, they 

 should be provided by the state. It may 

 be asserted safely that at the present time 

 money can not be invested to better pur- 

 pose than in judicious support of medical 

 laboratory work. A survey of the results 

 of such work shows a greater return in 

 practical benefits to mankind than can be 

 claimed perhaps by any other mode of 

 utilizing the money. The medical discov- 

 eries of the last twenty-five years demon- 

 strate conclusively that the endowment of 

 medical science yields an enormous reward, 

 and nothing seems more likely than the 

 probability that those medical schools and 

 those countries which fall behind in the 

 maintenance of medical laboratories and of 

 scientific workers in medicine are destined 

 to occupy an inferior place in medical edu- 

 cation and to remain behind in social and 

 economic importance. 



MEDICAL LABORATORIES AS A TRAINING PLACE 

 FOR PHYSICIANS 



A large part of the education which med- 

 ical students receive nowadays is given to 

 them in laboratories. Instead of the di- 

 dactic lecture of former periods the student 

 in a medical school of our time does prac- 

 tical work in nearly all the subjects of the 

 medical course. In the anatomical labo- 

 ratory he dissects the human body and 

 examines its constituent organs, tissues and 

 cells under the microscope, making many 

 of the preparations for himself. In the 

 physiological laboratory he studies the 

 functions of the animal body less from 

 books and from lectures than from actual 

 observation, as he repeats the experiments 

 of the great masters who have made funda- 

 mental physiological discoveries. In the 

 pathological laboratory he assists in the 



