Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/527

Rh this in the education of the physician, I would ask to consider how little of medical science can actually be presented there to the student. Certain functions can be demonstrated in physiology, certain processes and products in chemistry, certain anatomical facts and certain parasites as etiological factors in pathology. The prolonged impact of untoward conditions, the silent movement from health to disease, the shadowy boundary between the two who can adequately demonstrate them in the laboratory. There the days, months and years of disease processes must be concentrated into minutes and hours. Much of the laboratory work is like the ward visit, a fragment, to be pieced out through the agency of books, lectures and the imagination.

I am of course fully aware of the great importance of thoroughly training the senses and the powers of observation. The chief means of communication of the physician with his patient is through the medium of the senses, and the more avenues of intercourse are opened between him and the diseased body by increased delicacy of sense perceptions and by instruments of precision which aid and control the sense impressions, the more precise the diagnosis.

Lest I be misunderstood, I wish to emphasize the importance of bringing the student who is to be the future practitioner in as close contact with laboratory research and its immediate fruits as possible. For he will be the one to apply new points of view, gained experimentally, in the prevention and treatment of disease. Unless he gains some confidence in the laboratory and its methods and is ready to welcome its fruits how can medicine make any progress? His own contact with the laboratory should be for him a strong support and create in him faith in the ultimate triumph of science over the problems and mysteries of disease. Its influence should reach far beyond his years of training. When in practice he is disturbed by the confusion of voices, which, like the will-o'-the-wisp, lead neither here nor there, or when he is perplexed by the movement of fads and fashions pointing now in one, now in the diametrically opposite direction, when he comes to realize that much of his professional work is still empiricism and that it moves from precedent to precedent, he will look back upon his best laboratory work with a feeling of relief and recognize in it the germs of the science of medicine where his results came true if he worked accurately, and where he could predict the outcome. This power to predict which characterizes science should stimulate the trained physician to urge on in every way his profession toward the scientific ideal. If the laboratory succeeds in creating a desire to aid in realizing in the student this ideal its work will be well done. This craving to place his profession on a more and more scientific basis will lead to steady intellectual growth and insight and a proper receptive attitude toward the progress of science.