Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/227

Rh as illustrated by the work and writings of Cabot, promises to give to university research a new field of activity; to medicine a powerful ally; and to society, an ideal, of great promise for the good of the community.

To these various influences which I have presented at some length, we may, I believe, ascribe what little advance has been made in university research in medicine in this country. The same influences will continue to operate. The breaking down of the hard and fast lines which were drawn originally around the institutes of medicine will continue. As in the past, so in the future, the formation of new departments from the older departments will limit the field to be cultivated by a single individual and thus the time devoted to teaching a single subject will be divided, and as a result more time and opportunity for productive investigation will be allowed. Already immunology clamors to be released from alliance with bacteriology, hygiene or pathology; protozoology claims a domain distinct from that of bacteriology; pathological physiology demands greater recognition; and a new field—experimental therapeutics—distinct from pharmacology, is already well defined; all such expansions mean greater freedom and greater opportunity for investigation. These tendencies and the closely allied factor, the increased recognition of the hospital as a place for research (and especially the planning of groups of special hospitals, as at the Harvard Medical School), represent the forces within the university which have made progress possible. Of the forces from without which exert an influence, one, already discussed, is endowment for special investigation. A second is the influence exerted by independent institutions for research, as the Rockefeller Institute and Hospital, which by its magnificent work has stimulated the better university schools to greater effort in the advancement of medical knowledge.

A third factor is the demand of a gradually awakening public opinion that medicine should take a more prominent part, active and advisory, in the affairs of the community. The effect of this demand is already seen in the fact that the limitations and aloofness that characterized medicine in the past have already begun to disappear, and we can confidently look forward to a day when the activities of medicine, on its research and preventive sides, at least, will be—if I may so express it—imbedded in the social system, and shall live by and for it. In this connection, the university should not forget that the science of bacteriology and the knowledge which it has popularized concerning the etiology and control of disease and pestilence, formerly considered as foreordained and without remedy, has brought to the race a new hope concerning many of man's afflictions, and this hope is tinctured with an impatient demand that all preventable diseases, whether due to infection or occupation, should be thoroughly investigated. Preventive medicine has become a great educational movement, the onward sweep of which has been accelerated by modern views concerning the