608 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII, No. 694 



sounded, for it would be a grave error to 

 deprive ourselves of what is good in the old 

 because of the helpfulness of the new. 

 That such a fear should be expressed, how- 

 ever, shows how tremendous a hold labora- 

 tory methods are taking of the minds of 

 developing clinicians. 



Aside, however, from the laboratories 

 connected with hospital wards there has 

 been in recent years a phenomenal growth 

 of private and public laboratories in our 

 towns and cities for the use of private prac- 

 titioners of medicine and officers of public 

 health. I am sure that the laity scarcely 

 realizes how much such laboratories pro- 

 mote the early diagnosis and facilitate the 

 treatment of disease, and especially to how 

 great an extent through them infectious 

 and contagious diseases in the community 

 are prevented and controlled. Time will 

 not permit me to enter upon an enumera- 

 tion of these particular benefits. I desire, 

 however, to express my gratification at 

 learning that at least some portion of these 

 new laboratories which you have built in 

 Kingston is to be devoted to the service of 

 the public health, and I predict that no 

 small part of their usefulness to this com- 

 munity and to the people of this province 

 will result from the activities of the public 

 health division of your laboratories. 



MEDICAL, LABORATORIES AS CENTERS OP 

 RESEARCH 



In addition to being necessary and de- 

 sirable'' places of instruction for medical 

 students and also institutions for practical 

 use in the prevention and cure of disease 

 by physicians and officers of the public 

 health, medical laboratories subserve a still 

 higher purpose, to which we should for a 

 few moments advert,— I mean the func- 

 tion of medical research. In university 

 circles no special plea for original research 

 is necessary I know, for in those circles the 

 advantages of creative inquiry, both from 



the economic side and from the standpoint 

 of the highest human ideals, are well 

 understood. It is to be feared, however, 

 that the general public, sympathetic as it 

 is with scientific advance in general and 

 with the efforts made by scientific investi- 

 gators in the struggle for enlightenment, 

 has no adequate realization of the results 

 which have already attended the studies of 

 medical scientists or of the urgency for the 

 promotion of original studies in strictly 

 medical domains. The public has always 

 been willing to pay for hospitals to care for 

 the sick, but it is only in recent years that 

 it has begun to awaken to the possibilities 

 of preventing disease by the endowment 

 of research specifically directed thereto. 



The advances which have been made in 

 our own time by investigative medicine are 

 truly phenomenal, and no layman, unless 

 he has made a special point of looking into 

 the matter, has any conception of the in- 

 creased power medical men now possess to 

 lessen physical suffering from disease and 

 accident, or the means at their command 

 for controlling the spread of infectious and 

 contagious disease. Not only has the 

 prospect of life for each human individual 

 been markedly lengthened, but immeasur- 

 able advantages have accrued to the race 

 as a whole, no small part of our industrial 

 development at home and the opening up 

 of countries abroad hitherto inaccessible 

 to civilized whites having been due to the 

 protective discoveries of modern medical 

 science. It is not my purpose at this time 

 to review even briefly the triumphs of 

 modern preventive medicine, interesting 

 as it would be to outline to you what has 

 been done regarding the cause and the 

 prevention of diseases like typhoid fever, 

 Asiatic cholera, bubonic plague, yellow 

 fever and malaria. The advances made 

 in the prevention and cure of diphtheria 

 and in the lessening of infant mortality are 



