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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1092 



ization of teaching by closer attention to 

 the peculiarities of the individual pupil, the 

 splitting of large classes into smaller and 

 smaller groups, the elective plan, the con- 

 tinuous session, best exemplified in the 

 quarter system, research as an essential 

 function of the university and as a peda- 

 gogic method, the division of the sciences, 

 particularly, into smaller subdivisions, 

 specialization in a word — these and other 

 pedagogic innovations were, and still are, 

 receiving attention from educators, and are 

 being adopted throughout our educational 

 system from the kindergarten onward. Of 

 special importance were the introduction of 

 objective methods of teaching, in field and 

 laboratory, and the recognition of the indi- 

 vidual differences of pupils, with the con- 

 sequent necessity of adjusting the educa- 

 tional process to these differences by some 

 scheme of election or selection of topic, 

 method and teacher in order to secure the 

 best results. 



Laboratory methods began to be intro- 

 duced into the American colleges — on any 

 extensive scale — not much more than half 

 a century ago, at first in chemistry, then in 

 physics and later in the several biologic 

 branches. The supplanting or supplement- 

 ing of the older didactic methods of lecture 

 and recitation by these laboratory exercises 

 extended rather rapidly in the literary col- 

 lege, but they made their way much more 

 slowly in the medical school. It might have 

 been expected that the contrary would have 

 been the ease when it is recalled that for 

 a century or more one laboratory or prac- 

 tical course, that of human dissection, had 

 occupied a recognized place in the medical 

 curriculum, and was required of every stu- 

 dent, but it is barely thirty years since any 

 other laboratory course was generally re- 

 quired in the medical college. It is but 

 little over thirty years since the writer at- 

 tended the two five-months courses of lec- 



tures at that time required for graduation 

 in a medical college of the middle west. 

 Coming from a small university, where even 

 at that time the laboratory exercise con- 

 stituted the most important feature of in- 

 struction in all of the sciences, it seemed 

 strange to find no practical work whatever, 

 aside from dissection and a brief four or 

 five weeks' superficial course in chemistry. 

 A year later, having discovered that he was 

 inadequately prepared, it was decided that 

 he should take another course of lectures, 

 and the choice of an eastern medical col- 

 lege was determined by the fact that it 

 alone, of all of the medical colleges in this 

 country, offered a practical or laboratory 

 course in connection with each of the seven 

 departments — chairs, as they were called — 

 which made up the medical college of that 

 day, namely, anatomy, physiology, chemis- 

 try, materia medica, medicine, surgery and 

 obstetrics. Most of these practical courses 

 were brief and superficial, consisting in 

 large part of demonstrations by the teacher 

 rather than of individual work by the stu- 

 dent, but they were the beginning of better 

 things. 



The explanation of the tardy adoption by 

 the medical faculty of these modern meth- 

 ods is to be found in the fact that its mem- 

 bers were not primarily educators, and they 

 were therefore not keeping closely in touch 

 with the advances in pedagogic methods. 

 They were for the most part, even in the 

 fundamental branches, practitioners of 

 medicine for whom the giving of medical 

 lectures two to four times a week during 

 the five or six winter months was an inci- 

 dental avocation. Not until the medical 

 schools came to have a real, vital connection 

 with the university, and its faculty was 

 brought in close contact with, and came, in 

 part, to be composed of, men who were ma- 

 king teaching the chief, if not the sole busi- 

 ness of their lives, was any considerable 



