Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/534

530 continual presence of disease its problems may become trivial and its practise ineffective.

The university medical school may in still another way hasten the diffusion of sounder views concerning health and disease by creating more interest among the educated in the general problems of pathology. This is but the obverse of physiology, and its principles once scientifically founded and objectively developed along general and comparative lines, should form an attractive study in all biological laboratories. We are still some distance from the realization of this suggestion, but the task is worthy of the best men in our best schools.

If we take this broad view of the work of the university medical school and try to put it into effect, medical science will come out of its somewhat isolated position and take its proper place beside the other sciences. The work of the physician will then be rated more justly, because the great complexity of the problem of health and disease will be more appreciated. His services will then be sought more frequently before rather than during the calamity of illness, because it will be better understood why he can more easily forestall and prevent than cure disease.