Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/131

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
SKETCH OF RUSSELL H. CHITTENDEN.
119

peared in January of the present year—and is one of its editors. He was one of the original members of the Committee of Fifty for the investigation of the drink problem, and has contributed, with the aid of his coworkers in the physiological laboratory, two important papers containing the results of various researches on the influence of alcoholic drinks upon the chemical processes of digestion, and their effect upon secretion, absorption, etc. He served as one of the vice-presidents of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, held at Washington, May, 1897, at which he presented a paper on "internal secretions" considered from a chemico-physiological point of view.

Professor Chittenden has always been especially interested in bringing about a wider recognition of the importance of the chemicophysiological side of biology. He regards the physiological side as equally important with the morphological side of biology, but finds only scanty recognition of the fact in too many of the courses in biology, and only rarely tangible evidence of appreciation of the chemical side of physiology; and yet, as he has pointed out in an address before the first Pan-American Medical Congress, held at Washington in 1893, "there is hardly a question either in physiology or in the science or practice of medicine that does not draw to a greater or less extent upon physiological chemistry for its solution. . . . In every medical school in the land there should be a well-appointed laboratory for the practice and study of physiological chemistry in every direction bearing on medical science. So, too, in every well-rounded biological course there should be ample facilities for instruction and experimentation, not only in pure physiology but likewise in physiological chemistry, so that a broader and clearer conception of physiology may be obtained than is possible by the presentation of a single side of the subject" Professor Chittenden has labored faithfully to embody the principles expressed in these views and give them practical effect in the work of the biological course at Yale University. Morphology, comparative anatomy, general biology, botany, zoology, etc., are by no means ignored, but physiology and physiological chemistry have been made an integral part of the instruction in biology given to the undergraduate students in the Sheffield Scientific School.

The importance of physiological chemistry as an adjunct to the medical course is forcibly presented in the address to which we have referred, where the sovereignty of morphology, which had given the course a somewhat unsymmetrical development, is said to have reached its climax, and the clinicians are declared to be "even now looking to physiological chemistry to aid them in unraveling many of the hidden processes of life, thus helping to gain