A survey of the present condition of American medical education offers little hope for a higher intellectual status of the medical profession or of any fundamental tendency to turn medicine as a whole from a mélange of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and commercial cunning, toward the rarer heights of the applied sciences.
Such a reform depends absolutely upon the recognition that the bodies of all the fauna of the earth (including Homo sapiens) are essentially physico-chemical mechanisms; that disease is a derangement of one sort or another of this mechanism; and that real progress in knowledge of disease can only come from quantitatively exact investigation of such derangements.
Up to the present, the number of professors in any branch of medicine who are aware of this fact is pitifully few. The men, who, being aware of it, have the training in physics and chemistry to put their convictions into practice are less in number. So, it is vain to hope that medical students are being educated from this point of view.
This casual glance at American medicine may be thought to be an unduly pessimistic one. It has not been my intention to be pessimistic or to be impertinently critical. Indeed, turning from the art of the practice of medicine, and the religion and folk-lore of sanitation, to the science of the study of disease, we have much of which to be proud. American biochemists of the type of Van Slyke and Folin are actually in the lead of their European brothers. Their precise quantitative methods furnish invaluable tools in the exact study of the ills that afflict us.
Finally, the greatest figure of all, Jacques Loeb, working in an institution that declares its purpose to be the dubious one of medical research, has in the last three years published investigations which throw a flood of light upon the dark problems of the chemistry of proteins. His work is of most fundamental significance, will have far-reaching results, and is measurably in advance of that of any European in the same field. Loeb, like all men of the first rank, has no spirit of propaganda or proselytism. His exact quantitative experiments rob biology of much of its confused romantic glamour. The comprehension of his researches demands thorough knowledge of physical chemistry. However, it is encouraging to note that among a few younger investigators his point of view is being accepted with fervour and enthusiasm. But it is time to stop. We are straying from our subject which was, if I remember, American medicine.
Anonymous
SPORT AND PLAY
Bartlett does not tell us who pulled the one about all work and no play, but it probably was the man who said that the longest way round was the shortest way home. There is as much sense in one remark as in the other.
Give me an even start with George M. Cohan, who lives in Great Neck, where I also live, without his suspecting it—give us an even start in the Pennsylvania Station and route me on a Long Island train through Flushing and Bayside while he travels via San Francisco and Yokohama, and I shall undertake to beat him home, even in a blizzard. So much for “the longest way round.” Now for the other. If it were your ambition to spend an evening with a dull boy, whom would you choose, H. G. Wells, whose output indicates that he doesn’t even take time off to sleep, or the man that closes his desk at two o’clock every afternoon and goes to the ball-game?
You may argue that watching ball-games is not play. It is the American idea of play, which amounts to the same thing, and seventy-five per cent, of the three hundred thousand citizens who do it daily, in season, will tell you seriously that it is all the recreation they get; moreover, that deprived of it, their brain would crack under the strain of “business,” that, on account of it, they are able to do more work in the forenoon, and do it better, than would be possible in two or three full days of close sticking on the job. If you believe them, inveterate baseball fans can, in a single morning, dictate as many as four or five twenty-word letters to customers or salesmen, and finish as fresh as a daisy; whereas the non-fan, the grind, is logy and torpid by the time he reaches the second “In reply to same.”