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The Bacteriologic Department of the Corlear Medical School stood at this time on one of the cross-streets of the old East Side, not far fro, worn of threshold, and as ugly in line as a livery barn Its entrance was s to let in the light Not one touch of color or grace, not one dignified line could be detected throughout its whole exterior It was constructed for use, not ornament
Interiorly it was quite as utilitarian Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a ht knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one to step into the presence of the inative of individuals--the erms, poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the unattainable, concerned with the ulti on for love of his work, while the sick of the world believe in hiel of altruism
The far-away rivers of the world have all been traversed and mapped, but the streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the unknown The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Suocytes remain indeterminate, unexplained Withthe constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and rowths of tumors, and other elemental foronisles of the flesh the war of races proceeds quite as in the A, destroying
The men behind these bald, bleak doors are tireless workers as well as seers and sages They toil (at ridiculously low salaries) in the avowed hope of eradicating diseases They do not pause in dismay of the insoluble They--or such as they--discovered the cure for small-pox, for hydrophobia, diphtheria, and for yellow-fever They and their like brought chloroform to the woman in travail, and ether to the wounded soldier They have enormously reduced the number of those who die on the battle-field by their antiseptic dressings, and by one discovery after another have made infantile diseases less destructive They already control yellow-fever and are about to eradicate typhoid--yet they say "our work is but begun"