Science and Medicine 211were spreading across the land, similarly transforming other medical
schools. By the turn of the century the medical schools at Harvard, Penn-
sylvania, Chicago, and Michigan had joined Johns Hopkins as important
medical research centers, but the country still lacked an institution com-
parable to the Koch Institute in Berlin or the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In
1901, however, Congress provided funds for a national hygienic labora-
tory to investigate infectious and contagious diseases, and, more impor-
tant, John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate, donated the fi rst of millions of
dollars to create the fi nest medical research facility in the country.^48 Con-
vinced by reading William Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892)
that “medicine could hardly hope to become a science until medicine
should be endowed and qualifi ed men could give themselves to uninter-
rupted study and investigation, on ample salary, entirely independent of
practice,” Rockefeller’s chief advisor, Frederick T. Gates, resolved to create
such a place. The resulting Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research not
only freed researchers from practicing medicine but from teaching as well,
allowing them to devote their entire lives to medical science. Its success
soon inspired the creation of other American institutes for medical re-
search and provided a model for the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, which
opened in Berlin in 1911.^49
By this time scientifi c expertise was paying off clinically and economi-
cally. Soon after the young Harvard- trained physician Richard Cabot had
mastered the analysis of blood using microscopic and serological tech-
niques, he volunteered to accompany sick soldiers returning home from
the Spanish- American War. Despite his youth, none of his colleagues could
best him in diagnosing malaria and typhoid fever. “No one else knew
anything,” he boasted. “I was king.” Unsurprisingly, Cabot went on to a
lucrative career as one of Boston’s leading medical consultants.^50
“The intrusion of science into clinical medicine,” as an infl uential
American practitioner once described it, picked up momentum after 1913,
when the Rockefeller- funded General Education Board launched an initia-
tive to create full- time salaried positions for clinicians. “No single event
has had a more profound effect of medical education and medical practice
than the movement to full- time positions in clinical departments,” con-
cluded A. McGehee Harvey of Johns Hopkins. “Out of this emerged the
clinical scientists, versed in the bedside practice of medicine and capable
of applying the knowledge and techniques of the basic sciences to the
study of human disease.” Under the control of such hybrid scientists, hos-
pitals became “temples of science” where clinical and laboratory research
was conducted and medical students were educated.^51