his work to others, but you and I, who are practical laborers in the vineyard, know that this does not work and that actually the chief must do it himself if the department is to run smoothly. “Clinical experience” is apt to be put last among the specifications. This is because some of our friends think that clinical medicine can be “picked up” very easily by the prospective professor, while others believe that if a man is well trained in such sciences as chemistry, physics and physiology he has only to learn the technical clinical methods of percussion and auscultation. Clinical medicine is to them little more than the application of these sciences to the sick patient, which is, comparatively, easily acquired. As a matter of fact, however, we know that clinical medicine is a subject which is to be mastered only by years of long, hard experience, and if any of the members of the committee to select a professor were taken sick and were to be under his care, I am pretty certain they would rate “experience” higher. The argument actually put forward, that the professor need not be much of a clinician because some one else can tell the students how to take care of patients, is weak and beside the point because it begins by accepting as insignificant what is a very important function of the department. I believe that the primary function of a department of medicine is to teach students those things that will enable them to practice the best contemporary medicine and will give them a foundation on which to superimpose the advances that will come during their professional life. They must be taught medicine as a vital and expanding subject, and must be stimulated to keep abreast of its growth. If it be true that preparation of students for a career in clinical medicine, and more specifically for the practice of medicine, is the first duty of a department of medicine, then it seems clear to me that the backbone of the clinic is the general ward and the outpatient department, for it is here that one finds or can readily create conditions which most closely resemble those which are found in actual practice. In order to preserve this backbone intact I have always hesitated to encourage the development of wards and departments for special groups of patients. This is, of course, necessary to some extent both for intensive training and for research, but it should not be done at too great expense to the general ward, lest the general ward come to contain nothing but what are regarded as “uninteresting cases,” and the idea of specialization be instilled in student and staff too soon. After all, “intensive training” does not involve the study of many patients of a group at one time, and the rest can be left in the general ward, which should be as exciting in its variety and unexpected manifestations of disease as is the actual practice of medicine.