Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/128

116 scientific department of Yale. He was graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School in 1875 with the degree of Ph. B., when nineteen years of age. His graduating thesis was considered sufficiently noteworthy to be published in the American Journal of Science, and it was also translated into German and published in full in Liebig's Annalen der Chemie, Leipsic. As an undergraduate in the Scientific School he evinced great devotion and aptitude in the study of chemistry, and became especially interested in chemistry as applied to physiology. His success is shown by the fact that in the last year of his undergraduate study he was appointed a laboratory assistant in chemistry, to carry forward such instruction in its physiological bearings and applications as was then possible. In this connection it is to be remembered that the Sheffield Scientific School was one of the first institutions in the country to recognize the importance of a preliminary scientific education for young men intending to study medicine, and in the annual catalogue for 1869-'70 reference is made to an appropriate scheme of study specially designed for those expecting to pursue the courses in the medical schools. This was the beginning of the so-called "biological course" in the school with the development of which Professor Chittenden has been closely identified. The existing laboratories of chemistry, physics, zoölogy, and botany at Yale had made it easy to establish a course in general biology at this time, well adapted for providing instruction in branches especially fitted for men intending to enter the medical profession, but in which facilities in physiology and physiological chemistry were still almost wholly wanting.

The general character of the work done in this department is fittingly recognized by President Gilman, who says, in his semi-centennial address: "One of the most advantageous of these courses has been preliminary to medicine. To follow the healing arts, which have made during the last half century such wonderful advances, discipline is requisite in physics, chemistry, and physiology with prolonged laboratory practice and increasing familiarity with the normal functions of organic life. Such courses were projected here five and twenty years ago, and gradually the medical colleges are discovering their value. The Johns Hopkins Medical School, for example, allows no student to enter as a candidate for its four years' course unless he has had such training, substantially as that here offered many years ago, and never so advantageously as now. Names might be cited of eminent physicians, leaders in physiology, pathology, physiological chemistry, and hygiene, who received their bent from the preliminary medical course of the Sheffield School."

Physiological chemistry was, indeed, at that time given very scant attention in this country, and its importance in biology