Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/46

40 to enable them to understand and apply what is being done by the most advanced workers and discoverers? The training that the medical student must undergo in order to enable him to comprehend and apply with intelligence the new methods and discoveries in medicine can not be obtained in a poorly equipped institution nor by poorly equipped minds. It is for this reason that Harvard has hailed with such joy the incoming of the means to equip her medical school properly, and has so raised its standard of admission that the equivalent of a college degree is demanded of those permitted to enter the school.

The study of medicine, broadly considered, has reached such a stage that its present day aspect can be taught only in a great university and by university methods. The old-fashioned medical school served its purpose; but it has had its day, and it can no longer prepare its students to meet the demands of modern medical science.

The new equipment of the medical school will greatly strengthen the connection between it and the college at Cambridge. Hitherto it has been a school apart from the main university, and many a man has graduated from Harvard College without being made practically aware that there is such a thing as the Harvard Medical School. It will be possible under the new conditions to greatly enlarge the scope of the electives that bear on a medical education that may be taken by members of the college or other departments of the university. The departments of psychology and physics in the university can now be properly correlated with the Medical School both in pedagogy and in original investigations.

Hitherto the lack of space facilities and apparatus has made the lecture room and the clinic the main features of student contact with the professors of the school, and this has of necessity kept the feeling of a technical school alive in the student body. The new equipment will incite and foster the growth of the broader university spirit in both study and research. The medical school will now be able to do what it could not do before, that is, to offer facilities to students and investigators of other departments of the university for special study and research under medical school auspices.

One of the most important features of the improved systems of medical study is the learning how to use medical literature and the acquirement of the habit of using it. It is only a small proportion of the physicians of the country who can come directly in contact with the special fields of investigation in medicine, and so the chief available channel for keeping up with current progress is through medical literature. The Harvard Medical School possesses unusual facilities for the training of its students in the proper use of the literature of the science. In the first place there are the great general libraries of Boston and Harvard College forming cojointly one of the best