Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/529

Rh concerning the true inwardness of research. It does not consist in trained senses alone. It is a quality, an attitude of the intellect working through the senses. Claude Bernard clearly recognized this when he said: 'He who does not know what he is looking for will not lay hold of what he has found when he gets it.'

Though research may be carried on and is going on in all departments of medicine to-day, yet the true home of the investigator is the modern laboratory. Here we have a kind of reproduction in miniature of the actual field of work, where, by means of physical, chemical and biological methods of analysis, the problem in hand may be reduced to as simple terms as possible or at least confined within more or less governable conditions. When it has reached a certain stage of maturity, then facilities should be at hand which enable the investigator to approach cautiously the very complex conditions of actual disease in the hospital and its special laboratories.

The university medical school has thus two duties to perform, to train practical men, physicians and health officers, and to encourage the few who incline to research. The methods of training for both coincide for a large part of the course, but they must eventually diverge, the practical man to enter the actual field of conflict with disease and forge his weapons as well as he can from the storehouse of the world's accumulated experience and science, the investigator to continue his struggle with the stubborn and evasive facts of nature.

To carry out this program the university school must have teachers who are investigators, well-equipped laboratories both for large classes and for individual advanced workers. It must have satisfactory stables and operating rooms for small and large animals, for the experimental and observational study of animal diseases is the logical outcome of laboratory research. It is another intermediate station on the way to human pathology. It frequently presents such strikingly clear solutions of difficult problems and permits us to introduce the comparative method which has been so fruitful in the biological sciences. Closely associated with the school should be hospitals and clinical laboratories. Let us look at a few of these requisites very briefly.

The training and encouragement of research as well as thorough teaching in our medical schools lead by implication to the doctrine that professors should be investigators themselves. For the purpose of elementary class work it may be maintained that it is enough for teachers to instruct with the aid of all the paraphernalia of the day. But what shall they teach? Shall they go no faster than the successive editions of text-books allow, or shall they express an opinion about or actually teach the newest doctrines? As I stated before, the knowledge of the world is covered with the froth of research