Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/532

528 to-day in pathology belongs to clinical medicine and surgery, for it is largely special and diagnostic in character. The pathologist is now the servant of the physician and surgeon in completing and rectifying their diagnoses. The pathologist of the future will deal with more general phenomena derived from experimental and comparative data, just as the physiologist has moved onward, or backward if you please, into general and comparative physiology. Similarly, the burden of other now scientific departments will be shifted into the more practical branches to make way for more fundamental problems. The logical outcome of such a rearrangement of studies would be eventually a college course arranged wholly with a view toward medicine and sanitary science, in which the bulk of the present early studies of the medical school would find a place, and, secondly, a practical course in medicine, surgery and sanitary science, in which clinical, hospital and public health laboratories would take a prominent part. It may be that in this way the time and energy of the student aiming for two degrees and a livelihood could be saved, while the efficiency and scope of the course could be increased at the same time.

The establishment of research institutes by governmental authority and private munificence marked the beginning of a new epoch in medical science by organizing research and giving it an assured status. The influence of these institutes upon research in the university medical schools will be watched with much interest. Unless the latter take a more definite position and furnish opportunity whereby investigations of a more serious and exhaustive scope may be undertaken, the research institutes will absorb the best men and the highest class of work and leave research as heretofore a by-product of the schools, often desultory, discontinuous and trivial. To avoid this impending calamity, the professors should be relieved of various routine duties incidental to the management of laboratory workshops. There should also be appointed investigators of definite rank whose teaching should be subordinated to research in such a way that the latter will not be seriously impaired by long interruptions.

In conclusion I wish to dwell briefly upon a phase of our subject which is perhaps the most important of all and toward which the various lines of our discourse have been converging.

The relatively large endowments given to medical education and research in recent years have created as it were a trust to be administered by the medical profession in the interest of human society in the broadest and highest significance of the term. This I interpret to mean that we must endeavor to make all advance in our knowledge of health and disease common property so far as this may be possible, to disseminate broadcast the benefits of research into the laws of health, so that they may enter into and form an integral part