AmjJu°iy?imrm'}  The  New  Medical  Laboratories.  315 
offered  in  these  laboratories,  workers  have  not  only  enormously 
increased  our  knowledge  of  the  structure  and  functions  of  the 
human  body,  and  of  the  nature  of  disease,  but  have  also  provided 
methods  which  have  already  robbed  some  of  the  most  direful  pesti- 
lences of  their  chief  terrors.  Hitherto  America  has  scarcely  kept 
pace  with  foreign  countries  in  provision  for  scientific  study  in  medi- 
cine and  in  incentives  to  its  prosecution.  While  this  aspect  of 
medical  education  has  not  been  wholly  disregarded  in  this  country, 
the  limitations  placed  upon  institutions  of  learning  by  their  inability 
The  New  Medical  Laboratories  of  the  University  of  Pennsylvania. 
to  provide  adequately  out  of  their  means  for  the  support  of  labora- 
tories has  had  a  detrimental  effect  upon  the  growth  of  American 
medicine.  In  other  countries  the  national  and  municipal  govern- 
ments have  done  what  in  this  country  is  left  to  the  accident  of  private 
inclination  and  beneficence. 
11  In  view  of  these  contingencies,  the  University  of  Pennsylvania  has 
constructed  a  new  medical  laboratory  which  was  formally  dedicated 
on  June  10,  1904.  In  completeness  of  equipment  this  new  building 
is  without  a  rival.  It  provides  for  the  teaching  of  students  and  the 
carrying  on  of  research  work  on  physiology,  pathology  and  phar- 
