There is a common tendency to attempt to select assistants in a department of medicine whose training represents the different preclinical sciences, physiology, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, physics, bacteriology, so that one may have a well rounded clinic. There is obviously much to be said in favor of such a plan as it helps to bring together an experienced group of “scientists”; but there is also an inherent practical danger which I am sure we all have observed and to which more attention should be paid. These men, thoroughly trained in one direction, quite naturally look for their research problems in the fields in which they are trained. They seek the problem to suit their particular tools. This must necessarily be the attitude of workers in a fundamental science when they attempt to study a clinical problem, and this may explain why they often are not more successful in formulating and working out problems involving a knowledge of disease in man. The approach of the internist to the study of disease in man should be quite different. He is, first of all, absorbed by an interest in the problem and then seeks the type of tools necessary to solve it. This is the intellectual, rather than the technical, method of approach. Once given an absorbing passion for the solution of a clinical problem, the man who has a good, general scientific training can usually acquire in a few months or in a year or so enough of any of the fundamental sciences to enable him to tackle it. The clinical investigator, with his knowledge of disease in man, thus finds the problem first and determines the practical way to study it, turning to his colleagues in the fundamental sciences especially for technical experience. We often discuss what the difference is between the function and opportunity of the man who is primarily a “scientist” working on a clinical investigation, and the man who is primarily an “internist” using methods of exactly the same highly refined nature, and also working on the same general type of investigation. The real difference is, I think, to be found in the point of view. The medical clinic should encourage its staff to use methods of any sort, no matter how difficult or specialized, that are needed for the solution of their immediate problems; but their first interest should center about the general subject of disease in man. The first interest of the “scientist,” on the other hand, is in the development of his own particular field. Each has his proper rôle, but in the medical clinic it is better to have an inspired “internist” than a skilled “chemist.”