Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/105

Rh It is four stories high, of reinforced concrete, faced with brick, and complete in all its appointments. The building contains laboratory rooms, a balance room, a library, photographic rooms, rooms for individual investigations, a refrigerating room, rooms for conducting studies in the nutrition of animals, store rooms, workshops and the office of the director.

The H. K. Gushing Laboratory will fill an important place in the field of medical research and education. So long as medicine was a comparatively simple science it was possible for the physician, while actively practising his profession, to keep himself sufficiently in touch with the fundamental medical sciences such as physiology, anatomy and pathology. The rapid advance, both in the practical arts of medicine and surgery and in the underlying sciences on which they depend has rendered it impossible for any one man to dominate both fields. Therefore the time seems to have come for improving the means of coordinating practical medicine and the medical sciences. It is proposed to accomplish this at the Western Reserve University by the establishment of a laboratory and chair of experimental medicine, the occupant of which and his assistants shall be expected to keep themselves in touch, so far as is possible, with clinical work, on the one hand, and physiology and pathology, on the other, and to encourage and direct investigation having a bearing upon both. The new foundation is intended to form a link between the knowledge of the laboratory and the knowledge of the hospital.

The researches which in the future may be carried out in this laboratory are planned to have, as far as possible, a direct practical bearing upon clinical questions. For example, some light has been thrown by experimental investigation on the pathology of such conditions as goitre, diabetes, gout, the anemias, ulcer of the stomach, etc.,