370 



SCIENCE. 



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



judgment. This same idea should be kept 

 in mind in estimating the value of research 

 work for the average professional student. 

 The training of medical students in the 

 United States is a vastly different thing in 

 theory and in practice both from what it is 

 in Germany, from which land we draw so 

 many of our ideals. We give the title of 

 * Doctor ' to the product of our schools, but 

 in reality we are producing practitioners of 

 medicine and in the shortest possible time. 

 The man really learned in medicine should 

 be able to present an original research, as 

 the German idea assumes, but the prac- 

 titioner may be just as successful in 

 actual contact with disease without this 

 skill. I would not be understood as un- 

 derestimating the value of high scien- 

 tific training for medical men. Indeed 

 in certain specialties the medical man's 

 success depends almost wholly on his 

 preeminent scientific knowledge acquired 

 by long and minute study. But there is 

 still room for the general practitioner in 

 medicine, and in my judgment he is, and 

 should still remain, the most useful member 

 of the profession. The American medical 

 school is mainly concerned in the training 

 of meil of this class rather than of those 

 with more special knowledge, and broad 

 culture is of more importance here than 

 minute acquaintance with bacteriology, 

 physiological chemistry or histology. This 

 is an age in which we are constantly called 

 upon to do something new, regardless of 

 whether the new thing is really needed or 

 not. This criticism applies to research 

 problems in physiological chemistry given 

 to medical students as well as it applies in 

 any other field. It will often be found that 

 the teacher's interests rather than those of 

 the student receive the first consideration, 

 and this is certainly without justification 

 in view of what I have said about the true 

 field of work in American schools. 



The teacher who attempts the proper 



presentation of general and physiological 

 chemistry in a medieal school has indeed 

 no easy task. His work is made doubly 

 hard by the fact alluded to above, that 

 chemistry among the older medical men is 

 still looked upon as a comparatively useless 

 study, and from his preceptor's office the 

 embrj'O doctor often brings this notion to 

 the medical school. To combat this idea 

 honestly, and to put his science before the 

 medical student as it would be presented in 

 a scientific or general course to freshmen or 

 sophomores, requires the full time and 

 energy of any man, and often little room 

 will be left for research investigation, or, 

 what is to some more alluring, the emolu- 

 ments of commercial or expert work. But 

 the sacrifice, if indeed it may be called 

 such, is worth the effort. There are about 

 25,000 medieal students in the United States, 

 and the number graduated each year is not 

 far from 5,000, in all schools. The number 

 of registered physicians is about 1 to 636 

 for the whole population. It is no small 

 matter to be able to make the proper im- 

 pression on the minds of these men, and 

 positions as teachers in the growing medi- 

 cal schools of the country have been per- 

 haps too long overlooked by the better class 

 of chemical graduates in search of academic 

 openings. There is a field here which is 

 worthy of fuller cultivation. 



While I have intimated above that the 

 possibilities for research work in chemistry 

 for the average medical student or teacher 

 are limited, and necessarily so, I am far 

 from underestimating such work. While 

 it is indeed true that in many quarters a 

 trifling research on some trivial point of 

 wholly artificial interest may be more 

 highly prized than is the most painstaking 

 and successful effort in class-work, and 

 while it is also true that the layman, or 

 professional man of little experience as 

 well, may often be deceived as to the real 

 value of such efforts, it is likewise a fact 



