The Doctor's Progress

...How little this notion is accepted by good authorities in medical science, who have themselves been leaders in bringing about medical advance, is evidenced by the erection of a magnificent building for their medical library at Johns Hopkins and its enthusiastic inauguration...

...All of these men are emphasizing the necessity for historical background if the science of our day is to be properly understood and, above all, properly applied...

...Even in the matter of progress there is failure to distinguish between ripples and waves...

...These events attest the awakening of interest in this country in the history of medicine...

...For universities must direct civilization...

...These newer interests are making it clear that, to quote John Fiske: Those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to set apart and stigmatize as the "dark ages" deserve rather the name bright ages, for there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with them...

...Some of Dr...

...Above all if the expression is used in the sense of catching the trend of popular opinion and yielding to it, the term would be an unfortunate description of university work...

...Ordinarily it is assumed that progress in medical science is so rapid that it is quite useless to know anything about preceding conditions, except for academic reasons...

...Professor Harvey Cushing, head of the Surgical Department of Harvard University, and formerly of the Johns Hopkins faculty, did not hesitate to declare that medicine has become so scattered and subdivided that there is a crying need for someone to lead it from the wilderness and again bind it together...

...indeed he is rather prone to regard bookishness as a form of swank...

...Indeed, without that background present-day medical progress becomes stilted and incapable of proper appreciation of the connotations of its own knowledge and the application of that knowledge to individuals, not as so many cases, but as human beings each of them differing from every other...

...Professor Welch has just spent a year, his first sabbatical year in nearly fifty, in visiting the universities on the continent of Europe...

...Because these older men left their heritage, to a great extent, in Latin, the last few generations have been without any adequate knowledge of them...

...This was what all the speakers of the occasion emphasized...

...Here were men all of whom have in recent years been intimately in contact with educational institutions in many parts of the world...

...And the conviction of the value of the history of medicine held by leading conservative members of the faculty is shared by a great many younger men who are themselves engaged at the present time in promoting just such medical progress as would presumably make the history of medicine mean less and less...

...As the result of this interest in the past, the middle-ages, once so bitterly contemned, are receiving their due mead of recognition for their achievements...

...Even as it is, the objection has been made that university education is fostering technological training rather than a deep understanding of science...

...They appreciate how much the historical background signifies for the proper understanding of modern achievement...

...Cushing said, comes from the history of medicine in cooperation with the great library...

...While modern progress is so manifest, many of the gropings of men after truth in the past are eminently suggestive, and help the members of our generation to understand their own thoughts better than they would otherwise find it possible to do...

...Professor Sudhoff, since he became Director Emeritus of the Institute for the History of Medicine at Leipzig, has made for himself a roving commission for the investigation of medical historical matters in various parts of Europe, Asia and Africa...

...The following week more than three hundred invited guests assembled in the auditorium of the Rockefeller Institute to hear his address on the medical institutions which came into existence at Cos and Cnidus as the great epoch-making initiation of Greek medicine...

...Abraham Flexner, who is a member of the General Education Board, has spent a considerable period recently lecturing at Oxford...

...He added: Unfortunately the doctor, speaking by and large, is wofully ignorant of the history of his profession...

...Dr...

...On October 17 he attended the dedication of the William H. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the next day made the keynote address at the inauguration of the University's Department of the History of Medicine...

...Professor Cushing ended with the hope that this Department of the History of Medicine may prove to be a place where medicine, the foster-mother of all sciences, once more in close contact with her whole family will imbue them all with the spirit of that ancient phrase, "Where there is love of humanity there will be love of the profession...

...Abraham Flexner, in his address at the inauguration of the Department, deprecated the idea that the one hope for civilization is to be forward-looking...

...Professor Sudhoff, whose presence in this country resulted from the invitation to take part in the opening of the Department of the History of Medicine, went so far as to say that the physician who lacked knowledge of the history of medicine as a science was "a mere mechanic...

...Flexner's auditors at least must have realized that, just as in the later middle-ages, dialectics occupied so much time and attention that philosophy itself suffered, so in our day technics have come to replace, to an unfortunate extent, the knowledge of clinical medicine...

...Professor Sudhoff emphasized how fine was the achievement of the very first medical school in the very first university -that of Salerno...

...The foundation of libraries and of institutions for the cultivation of the history of science, and particularly medicine, is sure to broaden men's minds...

...The best possible chance to accomplish this, Dr...

...It will make them sympathetic toward their forefathers, who tried so conscientiously to accomplish what was impossible with the limited means at their command, but who very often succeeded, by an intuition amounting to genius, in solving problems in their day that can only be thoroughly solved by the equipment at our disposal...

...Later he was the guest, successively, of the faculty of the Medical School of the University of Georgetown, Washington, D. C, where he made a historical address, and of the Philadelphia Society for the History of Medicine, in connection with the College of Physicians...

...THE DOCTOR'S PROGRESS By JAMES J. WALSH THE visit to this country of Professor Karl Sud-hoff, the founder and for many years the director of the Institute of Medical History of the University of Leipzig, the first of its kind in the world, has provided opportunity for a series of impressive academic events...

...Living as we do in a tumultuous time as members of a tumultuous generation, there is danger that people may become infatuated with current interests and lose their perspective entirely...

...Whenever there is a tendency to cater to superficial and immediate demands, degeneration of education takes place...