364 



SCIENCE, 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 349. 



ical and the practical. The American boy 

 has been taught to hold practical things in 

 the highest esteem, and chemistry was not 

 practical. Professors and students alike 

 felt it, and it is hard to tell who was the 

 most to blame for the warped and stunted 

 conception of chemistry held even at the 

 present time by the great majority of medi- 

 cal men of this country. It is likely that 

 much of the fault lay in the weak and 

 wholly unsatisfactory manner in which 

 chemistry was presented for fifty years in 

 most of our medical schools. The professor 

 of chemistry was usually a physician who, 

 as a rule, was not considered sufficiently 

 strong to fill the chair of practice, obstetrics 

 or surgery, but v/ho might teach acceptably 

 the less important branch of chemistry. 

 For the convenience of such teachers a 

 peculiar system of chemistrj^ called ' medi- 

 cal chemistry ' was developed, and in some 

 places persists to the present time. The idea 

 thatamantrainedoutsideof a medical school 

 could teach the kind of chemistry which 

 medical students really needed was of slow 

 development in the United States, and in 

 some quarters fails yet of recognition. But, 

 for part of the trouble we must go farther 

 back. While students in general courses 

 were taught the elements of the sciences, 

 languages and mathematics by recitations 

 and quizzes, medical students, with far 

 weaker preliminary training, were supposed 

 to be able* to absorb the essential facts of a 

 great department of human knowledge from 

 lectures alone. The lecture system is re- 

 sponsible for much of the superficiality in 

 the old-fashioned medical schools, and no 

 real progress was made until it began to be 

 recognized that a medical student must be 

 taught as other students are. With the 

 gradual dawn of this notion it became 

 finally possible to introduce into medical col- 

 leges rational chemical instruction, and the 

 laughable farce of presenting the so-called 

 medical chemistry to students ignorant of 



general chemistry will in time be a thing of 

 the past. 



This medical chemistry to which I call 

 your attention was often a curious combi- 

 nation of the good and the absurd. Ad- 

 mitting that the student should know 

 something about the chemistry of the blood, 

 the bile and the urine, something about 

 the nature of food stuffs and the processes 

 of digestion, it was thought sufficient to 

 present all these matters to him in con- 

 densed, so-called 'practical' form, and 

 without first requiring a solid preliminary 

 training in general and inorganic chemistry. 

 It was considered the correct thing to 

 memorize a lot of definitions, and to learn 

 to recite in parrot fashion a number of em- 

 pirical organic formulas. It must be ad- 

 mitted, however, that the fault was not 

 confined to medical schools alone. 



Chemistry in general may be studied 

 from two standpoints. First, as in the 

 college of liberal arts, as a fundamental 

 discipline, regardless of the possible appli- 

 cation which one may make of it. On the 

 other hand, it may be pursued as a neces- 

 sary preliminary to the understanding of 

 something else, and in this case its mastery 

 becomes all-important. One would natu- 

 rally suppose that in the latter case the 

 science would be much more thoroughly 

 cultivated than in the former, but this is 

 not always true. The discrepancy is per- 

 haps most glaringly apparent in the chemi- 

 cal work of the medical schools. It cannot 

 be expected of course that the chemistry 

 offered to the medical student of to-day 

 should be, as in the time of Hare, Gorham 

 and the elder Silliman, more complete than 

 that given to other students ; this would be 

 impossible and wholly unnecessary, as 

 chemistry is now a great specialty with 

 numerous departments branching in all 

 directions and a literature as voluminous as 

 that of scientific medicine itself. But this 

 much should be reasonably expected, that 



