Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/531

Rh motive power behind them they are more barren; they create the debts rather than the assets of research. This motive power consists of enough assured income to carry on research and develop the research powers of meritorious students. There should also be ample means for laboratory service. Research is in one sense a business, the laboratory a workshop. Here all sorts of processes are under way and as no one would expect a workshop to be carried on with only a foreman, so a laboratory can not be kept in use without laboratory service. Hitherto assistants have been made the motive power and the laborers; but this system should no longer be maintained. Not only is it wasteful to fill the time of assistants with routine manual labor, but it is wasteful in so far as the laboratory is dismembered at the end of each year. Every laboratory should be in working order even if all assistants are lacking. The trained laboratory servant should represent the routine and conservative, the assistants and investigators the progressive, element.

With the growth of the cost of research it becomes of great importance to exercise care and selection in admitting men to research positions. Fortunately there are not many collateral attractions in a life of research and the process of elimination acts as a rule automatically. Still there is danger just now that some of the flotsam and jetsam caught in an eddy or else afraid of the current of practical life may seek the quiet of the laboratory, because of some imagined taste or capacity which fails to materialize later on. It is far better not to have any research workers than poor ones.

The leaven of research which has so completely permeated and revolutionized all doctrines and practises of medicine in the past quarter century is still acting and no one can foretell how it is going to mold the medical science and practise of the coming decades. No one can foresee what it is going to do with the medical schools.

There will come without doubt much change in the artificial boundaries of the present so-called departments. Created for purposes of teaching and administration, they are a veritable bane to the investigator who can not stop mining because his vein happens to dip into another man's superficial territory. Even in the routine of teaching many changes are likely to come. I believe there will be developments in two main directions. The present laboratory studies, or propædeutics, will be deepened and extended in the direction of the more exact sciences, or toward the physical, chemical and biological work of the university proper. As a necessary result of this movement much of the work now done by these departments will move forward into clinical medicine and surgery, and there will be a corresponding growth and strengthening of the clinical and pathological laboratories of the hospitals. To illustrate: Much of what is taught