2 
THOMPSON YATES LABORATORIES REPORT 
that began a quarter of a century ago to send her sons for medical training to ourselves, has change 
tout celci and sends them to Berlin. Even our own Colonies invoke, when pestilence comes on 
them, the wisdom not of London or of Cambridge, but Berlin. Happily for suffering man and 
beast, and for our own renown, we have in the domain of Surgery the great work of Lister to place 
beside the triumph of Virchow and of Koch, of Pasteur and of Roux. And in regard to this it 
was a sinister sign of our condition that the benefits of Listerism had their wide recognition earlier 
in Germany and France than in England itself. The reason was that the Schools of Medicine 
in Germany were University schools. Their teaching and their studies were bound up with all 
the width of educational view that a university confers, and were linked closely with the far- 
reacliing activities of Faculties of Science. In England nine-tenths of the study of Medicine was 
prosecuted at schools unconnected with any university ; isolated from broad and generous 
learning, these remained narrowly technical. They knew little and neglected to know more of 
Chemistry, of Physics, and of Biology. Physiology, the hopeful basis of progress for them, 
divorced from her sister sciences, languished low within them. The English physiologist gave 
himself only to those branches of his study which could be prosecuted with least leisure and with 
least equipment. Hence it comes that to this day in England, with Physiology there is confounded 
Histology, the study of the cell-structure of the human body. One installation, one laboratory, 
and one professor have to satisfy both of the two studies, of which in other countries each 
receives an ample and an independent recognition. Nor, to say truth, has the more intimate 
fusion of the two been without some happy results, traceable although it is to causes blame- 
worthy in the schools. 
Tilings are now changing for the better with us. They must change still more if, as the 
fields of knowledge ripen under the ceaseless husbandry of the world's thought, our nation is to 
join others in the reaping of them, and not merely to glean where the more powerful have 
reaped. All this is well exemplified by two arts to which Physiology and Pathology stand in 
the most important and immediate connection — the art of Medicine and the art of Brewing. 
For centuries empirical, and less affected by the Renaissance than were the literary arts. Medicine 
has in the last half-century seen steps of progress in those sciences on which she rests, namely. 
Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Botany, beside which the progress of the previous centuries 
seems to us almost negligibly small. But to avail himself thereof, and to give his clients the 
blessings of the rich harvest of new knowledge open for him, the young medical man has to 
be better educated in natural knowledge than he used to be. As Medicine becomes more 
scientific she becomes less empiric. An art may be learnt in two ways ; by experience based on 
a rule-of-thumb dogma, or by experience based upon systematic research. Our foremost English 
pathologist has recently proclaimed that the former is the English way ; the latter is assuredly the 
German. In speaking of Medicine it must be conceded that he is as clearly right as he is clearly 
in earnest. It is the same with the art of Brewing. In our happy-go-lucky British fashion we do 
manage somehow to get some good beer, though we have to pay high for it, and it is on 
the average heavy stuff. But what of share, to say nothing of profit, has this country taken 
in work like that of Hansen, that revolution that has altered and is still reforming the brewing 
