Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/134

128 Here we must leave the story of the infectious diseases, which has occupied our attention from the beginning of the third lecture to this point, and turn to a brief discussion of other methods of modern research in medicine, those of physiological chemistry, pharmacology and experimental pathology, which had their beginnings in the subjects (chemistry, physiology and pathology) discussed in the second lecture. The presentation must, however, necessarily be but brief and fragmentary, a mere summary, in fact, of aims and methods.

Physiological Chemistry.—The beginnings in this most important field of research were in Liebig's exact methods for the study of organic chemistry and Wöhler's studies which are famous on account of his synthesis of urea. It is usually stated that the cultivation of physiological chemistry as a distinct science, with independent institutes of its own, dates from the eighth decade of the past century, when HoppeSeyler in 1872 established his laboratory at Strassburg and in 1877 founded the Zeitschrift f. physiologische Chemie. But although this period does represent the first attempt to sharply separate laboratories of physiological chemistry from those of organic chemistry, on the one hand, and of physiology, on the other, the first independent chair of physiological chemistry was established as my colleague, Dr. John Marshall, informs me, at the University of Tübingen in 1845 and was held by Eugen Schlossberger; likewise Schlossberger's laboratory was the first one to be devoted exclusively to the study of physiological chemistry. It was to this chair that Hoppe-Seyler was appointed in 1861, and which he held until shortly after the close of the Franco-Prussian war, when he accepted a similar chair in the University of Strassburg.