factory state of affairs. The General Education Board, endowed by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, has appropriated about one and a half million dollars to establish a William II. Welch fund. The revenue is to be used to enable the school to reorganize the departments of medicine, surgery and pediatrics so that the professors and their associates in the clinics and the laboratories shall be able to devote their entire time to their work. They are free to see and treat any one, whether inside or outside the hospital, but they will accept no personal fee for any such service.
The situation is clearly one of great difficulty. The professor of medicine or surgery may earn fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year by his private practise. If he relinquishes this for a salary of $10,000, the income may appear ample to the young physician, but scarcely so to the consultant, to whom the automobile has become one of the necessaries of life. If the salary is made larger than $10,000, an apparent injustice is done to the professor of physiology or Greek having equal ability. Then any socialistic scheme of this character limits the freedom of action of the individual, and under the existing system of university organization the limitation may be irksome and may even be subject to a serious trade risk. There is danger lest the ablest men may not want the professorships in the medical schools under such conditions.
Still the movement is surely in the direction that must ultimately prevail. The physician should be paid by the state to preserve health rather than be employed by the patient for a service which it is usually beyond his power to provide. In the face of opposition from the larger part of the profession the British government has this year provided a wide-reaching system by which the physician is largely paid by the state in accordance not with the number of visits he makes, but in proportion to the number of persons who select him. It may be that before long under the control of the state officers of our railways and industrial trusts will receive salaries on condition that they do not engage in outside business. A medical school and hospital which provided the best attainable medical and surgical skill could properly charge the rich fees in accordance with their incomes and earn large amounts to be used for medical research and the promotion of the health of the community. It might not be advisable for all medical schools to adopt the qualifications for students and professors of the Johns Hopkins school, but it is well that there is at least one such institution in the United States.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the death of Dr. Philip Reese Uhler, since 1891 provost of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, known for his contributions to entomology and geology; of Dr. Charles McBurney, formerly demonstrator of anatomy and professor of surgery in the College of Physicians of Columbia University; of Sir William Preece, the distinguished British electrical engineer; and of M. Charles Tellier, the inventor of the cold storage system.
It is announced from Paris that M. Charles Richet, professor of physiology in the university, has been awarded the Nobel prize for medicine.—Dr. George E. Hale, director of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, has been elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Professor Willard C. Fisher, whose forced resignation from the chair of economics and sociology at Wesleyan on the alleged ground of his views on Sabbath observance will be remembered, has been appointed lecturer on economics at Harvard University for the current academic year.
In connection with the Sixth International Congress of Mathematicians, to
