Observational, Rational and Scientific Medicine in Mexico

Abstract

In 1918, the newly appointed lecturer on physiology in the National School of Medicine of Mexico, asked the three assistants assigned to him, to start making demonstrations before his class. Neither he, who had been in the medical practice since 1900, nor any of them, had experience to the purpose.^{1, 2} Only one of the latter, to get exercise both in observation and experiment, set himself to repeat experiments he found described in the literature. His readings and the experience thus gained, soon led him to regret, in 1920, that physiology, the more scientific among medical disciplines, for not being cultivated and taught in his country upon an observational basis, had never been confronted by students, outside their books.³ He discovered, furthermore, that certain lectures in use as introductory to physiology, merely were discussions on hypothetical units of life,⁴ and unfit for the purpose, and that in others, for the study of general physiology,⁵ physico-chemical aspects of living processes were neglected, to “avoid astraying too far from physiology”. Visits made abroad to prominent physiologists devoted to teaching and research, convinced of the urgency of correcting local conditions. Consequently, four years were spent abroad: at Harvard, in Boston, and at the Marine Biological Laboratories, at Woods Hole, in the United States; at Cambridge University and Marine Biology Laboratories, at Plymouth, in England, and in the Physiological Institute, at Cologne, in Germany.