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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLII 



disease? Wherein lie fails to avail himself of present 

 knowledge he is culpable. And yet he is not to be 

 charged with the whole burden of his failure to cure. 

 Some of this should be shared, I regret to confess, by the 

 physiologists, for they still know too little of the normal 

 action of the vital mechanism. So far is this true, that 

 I am convinced that one of the surest and quickest means 

 of inaugurating a rational and effective art of medicine 

 is through the advancement of physiological discovery. 

 All physicians must be in part empirics until the physi- 

 ological millennium is ushered in. 



If I have been understood aright, my hearers will have 

 perceived that with a mighty subject matter which is pre- 

 eminently its own, physiology extends a leavening influ- 

 ence into a host of other sciences and medicine as well. 

 It is an unusually good example of the typical pure sci- 

 ence, with its outlying affiliations and applications. Like 

 many another natural science, its rise, growth and early 

 nurture were under the protecting wing of medicine. 

 The physiologists of the early years, when their science 

 was crystallizing out of the common mass of scientific 

 knowledge, the men who first formulated its principles, 

 and they who in later years developed it, were, with few 

 exceptions, men of medical training who were under the 

 influence of medical traditions and were guided by the 

 medical spirit. In recent years the ties of the old tradi- 

 tions have been loosened, and the science is passing out 

 from the parental shelter into the illimitable atmosphere 

 of scientific freedom. Its aspirations in research are un- 

 hampered. Its achievements in research, in so far as it 

 constitutes an academic theme, are limited by the fact 

 that, except in a few isolated cases, physiology is still 

 regarded by the university as primarily a medical science 

 and its laboratories are housed in medical schools. This 

 is a relic of early history. In consequence physiology 

 must constantly hreathe the medical atmosphere and 



ideals. This is not to be deprecated from the standpoint 

 of physiological medicine, and the reciprocal advantage 



