tion to the indispensably useful thus arrived at; or he may handle his subject freely —not unmindful of its practical value, but with broad scientific background and sympathy. It needs no argument at this point to vindicate the latter policy. Dissection has therefore ceased to be synonymous with anatomy; for no one way of looking at or of dealing with the cadaver will enable the student to grasp even its gross structure. It is one thing to take the body to pieces; it is something else to conceive these severed and dissociated elements in stereoscopic relation; and it is a still further task to unravel the tissues themselves: hence, on the macroscopic side, the prominence now given to reconstruction through drawing and modeling, and the close study of charts and of cross-sections, of models and of special preparations that form the indispensable teaching museum. Courses in histology and embryology, closely correlated with gross anatomy, furnish the accompanying microscopical discipline. Something like one-fifth of all the available time of the entire medical curriculum[1] is commonly absorbed by the various branches constituting a modern department of anatomy. How much of this may be profitably spent in the lecture-room is yet under discussion. It needs perhaps still to be emphasized that description is no substitute for tactile and visual experience, and that such experience, if intelligently controlled, both records and organizes itself with surprisingly little formal revamping.
Outside of anatomy, the laboratory method in medicine is considerably less than a century old. Its rapid spread has been in conservative quarters decried as a fad; but the facts suggest a nobler view. For the century which has developed medical laboratories has seen the death-rate reduced by one-half and the average expectation of life increased by ten or twelve years.[2] Of these laboratories, physiology had the first, that of Purkinje, at Breslau, established in 1824. In general, the experimental physiologist has proceeded upon the hypothesis that physiology is the physics and chemistry of living matter. He employs the apparatus and procedure of the physical laboratory to study the mechanical properties of tissue and the physical conditions to which these properties respond. The mechanism of the nervous system, the circulation, respiration, assimilation, muscular activity, lend themselves more or less readily to description and interpretation from the physical point of view. The apparatus and procedure of the chemical laboratory have been brought to bear in the analysis of bodily tissues, fluids, and secretions, and in the experimental reproduction of digestive and other processes. Not infrequently the subject is presented in two divisions, the former called physiology, the latter physiological- or bio-chemistry. That the mechanical standpoint has richly justified itself is indisputable; nevertheless, so far as concerns medical education, it is not yet ready wholly to absorb the functional point of view. An unbridged gap exists. Whether the physical sciences will ever so far refine their procedure as altogether to resolve function in mechanical
