A period of transition

The Nineties can be taken as a transitional period between a pio~ neering type of medicine and what may be considered as the forerunner of the modern era. It was at this time that a rising wave of medical progress became apparent inside the schools and out. Laboratories of physiology, pathology and bacteriology were being established, and part-time clinicians in the basic sciences were being replaced by full-time teachers with special training andinvestiga-tive interests in their chosen fields. Hospitals were taking on increasing importance as working laboratories for clinical instruction and research. These several factors naturally were conducive to efforts being directed concertedly toward the pursuit of systematic research. All such progressive activities brought to the minds of medical educators the necessity of adapting their colleges to the rapidly changing advances, and of aligning them with the widening vision of things still needed. Only by so doing could they make the medical colleges worthy members of the University family. Dr. James B. Herrick, in Memories of Eighty Years, concluded that those whose medical birth occurred about 1885 were fortunate above others because the next few decades were so packed with epoch-making events. These he enumerated as follows: "develop-ment of bacteriology; discovery of X rays; invention of instruments of precision; birth of allergy; growing importance of biological chemistry and physiology; more scientific views of public health; clearer recognition of the interrelation between medicine and its cognate sciences, like physics and zoology; new standards for medical schools and hospitals; evolution of specialism and group practice; endowments of institutes for research; rapid growth in size and power of the American Medical Association." Those who graduated in the third decade of the twentieth century might make a counter-claim for the privilege granted them of standing at the threshold of a door that opened. onto miracles hitherto unvisioned, but there is no denying the revolutionary aspect of the period that Dr. Herrick favored.