Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/523

Rh. Of this latter class the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the | Kockefeller Institute are conspicuous examples.

The founding of research institutes does not guarantee their success. That will depend upon the men who work in and for them. It has become evident that our research workers must have more diversified training than the older generation possesses. The store of knowledge accumulated by science must be made available to medicine. The only way in which this can be accomplished is to have trained men continually examining and testing this accumulating store of facts and applying them to the problems of disease. Such men should have medical training and approach their problems from the medical point of view; but to them should be spared the necessity of learning ultimate details of the medical art and they should give their energy to some sister study, be it morphology, physiology, chemistry or pathology. Medicine has just begun to realize the need of drawing to itself the great talent which hitherto has had an open door only to the pure and applied sciences. Research is largely dependent for its successful pursuit upon an attitude of the mind which insists on following a clew that promises to reveal some relationship, some law of causality between phenomena hitherto apparently unrelated. This type of mind has many of the attributes of the inventor who is attempting to combine to our advantage the forces of nature in new and unlooked-for ways and to express them in the form of labor-saving machines. In order to attract these minds we must pay them a living wage and provide workshop and tools, and exercise but moderate restraint over their activities. To them the exterior of practical medicine has a forbidding aspect. "We must bring them to face its really wonderful problems through the portals of the laboratory.

After we have established research institutes and brought together a devoted, enthusiastic group of scientists we must not look too closely at the immediate practical value of research. Most of the epochmaking discoveries have had little, if any, direct influence on medical practise at the start and even for some time after. Some have wholly failed to yield hoped-for results, but they have had great influence in unexpected directions. This is chiefly because great discoveries are as a rule not ripe for use. To point out a hitherto unrecognized cause does not thereby enable us to overcome its effects. These may be grounded in centuries of adaptation. A great discovery frequently does no more than call attention to a new fact without defining its relationships. The discovery of the tubercle bacillus for example left the whole question of its complex relation to a given host untouched. The same may be said for most other microbes. The delicate equilibrium between parasite and host is the thing to be worked out before we can rationally proceed to upset it in our favor. There is