minutes after putting in the oven. It should bake at least three-quarters of an hour, but the longer it is baked the more the starch is changed to dextrine. When milk is used for making raised bread it should be well scalded, and then cooled till about luke-warm. This acts as a preventive against souring.

As often as twice a week the bread-box and all flour receptacles should be scalded and dried, and exposed to the air and sun before using again, in order to guard against animal and vegetable parasites.

CEREALS.-Cereals are our best examples of starchy or farinaceous food, and are more abused than almost any other article of diet, unless it is the potato. It is well to increase the time of cooking in the printed direction at least threefold if you would be sure that your patients are not getting raw starch, which is impossible of digestion even in health, and is a fertile source of gastric disturbances. Cereals partly cooked eaten with cream and sugar are not retained in the mouth long enough for the saliva to have any effect upon them. The prolonged action of heat and moisture changes the starch to dextrine, a change similar to the first stage of digestion.

The length of time required to cook pearled wheat, pearled barley, coarse oatmeal, rolled oats, rolled wheat, rolled barley, fine hominy, and farina is from four to six hours; corn-meal and coarse hominy, six to ten hours; rice, one hour.

DISCUSSION

DR. W. E. ROCHFORD (Minneapolis): I would like to ask Dr. McCoy about refrigerated game and fish, of which we have so much in our city; what she thinks about its wholesomeness, and also about the cooking of cereals. We use a great deal of cereals in our home, and we are in the habit of cooking our oatmeal 6 to 24 hours. I am told the longer it is cooker the better.

DR. MARY McCoy (Essayist): In regard to refrigerator fowls, the sooner a fowl is eaten after being dead six or eight hours the more wholesome it is. If the entrails are left in a fowl while it is in cold storage I think it is very unwholesome. A person who eats those fowls in the city does not know what the right kind should taste like. The contents of the entrails will render them

very unwholesome as well as offensive to the taste. My practice in preparing oatmeal is never to remove my oatmeal cooker from the stove. As soon as breakfast is over the oatmeal is boiled thoroughly for fifteen to twenty minutes, and then left to simmer until the next breakfast. I never yet knew a cereal preparation that was not the better for long cooking, and I would not take any manufacturer's word for it that his food needed no cooking. I think the worst preparations on the market are the so-called predigested breakfast foods.

SCIENTIFIC METHODS IN MEDICAL EDUCATION

R. O. BEARD, M. D.

Minneapolis

Medical education derives its inspiration from the medical profession at large; for, while the teachers of medicine are usually in the vanguard of their calling, the institutions which they serve are rarely so well endowed as to put them out of that bondage to numbers, as a means of financial support, which so frequently paralyzes educational progress. It is, indeed, the self-interest of the profession as a whole which has served as a useful check upon the output of the colleges. The men who have graduated into an already overcrowded calling are always willing to put up the bars for those who follow. The instinct of self-preservation is in this. Beyond it, however, there are always higher motives which serve as the stimuli of medical education. They who know the limitations which their own and other lives have known, are anxious to enlarge the bounds of opportunity for their younger fellows. The higher instinct of paternity extends itself to our professional posterity.

It is well, therefore, that the medical profession should keep closely in touch with the work of the schools. Those of us who have been privileged to engage during the past twenty years in what one of our irreverent members terms "the nefarious business of making doctors," know well the rapid advances which medical education has made. They have become a matter of recent history, not yet wholly writ- › ten, and yet it is no small part of my present purpose to dwell upon the achievements. It is, rather, my intent to bring before this court of last adjudication-the judgment of the profession-certain of the scientific methods of teaching which medical educators are now seeking to adopt and

to secure for them perchance your approval and, if so, your support.

The movement to raise the standard of preliminary fitness to engage in the study of medicine, which has been in the throes of effort for so long, continues. It is being gradually lifted beyond the now common level of a highschool diploma to the inclusion of one, two, or even four years of academic work.

Of conspicuous aid in this movement has been the establishment in some half a dozen leading colleges, the University of Minnesota among them, of a six years' course for medical students. Their example is destined to be followed very soon by all the university medical schools. This six years' course has much to commend it to the profession. It provides a means of securing, to the best advantage, at least two years of academic training, for the first two years of the work are taken in the pursuit of carefully chosen premedical studies, in the colleges of science, literature, and the arts. It thus fulfills a fair measure of preliminary requirement. It lays a well-built foundation for the succeeding work of the strictly medical course. It offers a minimum of higher mathematics, sufficient as an introduction to the study of physics, which it treats in special adaptation to the science of medicine. It requires a knowledge of general botany as an introduction to materia medica; of the general chemistry and qualitative analysis which are thus anticipated in favor of essentially medical chemistry in the later years; of zoology and comparative anatomy, which leads up to the study of the human subject; and of English, German, and French as the vehicles of the medical literature of to-day. It shortens materially the period of time within which it has been possible, in the past, for the student to obtain both the baccalaureate and professional degrees, awarding to the completed six years' work the double degrees of bachelor of science and doctor of medicine. It recognizes the very vital principle that the science of histology, embryology, anatomy, medical chemistry, physiology, bacteriology, and pathology should be taught to medical students by medical men and

women, and with special reference to the applications of these studies to the science and practice of medicine. That principle puts life back into these fundamental natural sciences, and lifts them, in their influence upon human character and human action, to the level of the humanities of the educational past and the economics of the educational · present. So largely does the six years' course fulfill the needs of students of medicine that it will doubtless not be long before it is elected by nearly all candidates for admission wherever it is offered.

An equally new departure in medical teaching is the socalled "concentration system." Harvard University has the credit of the initiation of this method, while Minnesota has been a ready second in her adoption and development of the plan. It has been fully applied to the work of the first two years and in part to that of the third and fourth. It consists in an abandonment of the educational vaudeville in which medical students of the past and of the present, in most colleges, have been compelled to engage, and in the confinement of their attention during each semester or half semester to two or three subjects of study. To illustrate the method: In the first year, the opening semester is occupied with anatomy and histology alone; the second semester with physiology, chemistry and materia medica. In the second year, physiology, chemistry and therapeutics are taken in the first semester; anatomy and histology in the first half of the second semester; and bacteriology and pathology in the second half. In a word, the student concentrates himself upon a minimal number of subjects at one time, and is spared much of the mental gymnastics he has hitherto performed and much of the diffusion of energy resultant therefrom. The concentration method has been in operation for two years in the College of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Minnesota with the most admirable results.

So marked has been the educational progress incident to the development of laboratory methods of study in the sciences fundamental to medicine, and so evident have been