N CINCINNATI 140 years ago, at the opening of what was then our westernmost medical school, Dr. Daniel Drake, president of the New Medical College of Ohio, in his "Inaugural Discourse on Medical Education," said, "Clinical medicine is an unceasing employment of means for the accomplishment of specific or definite objects. Considered in relation to our knowledge of these means, the profession is a science-in relation to the application of them, it is an art. He who acquires the former only is learned; he who relies on the latter alone is ignorant, empirical, and criminal; he who encompasses both reaches the highest attainable perfection." Perhaps this is where a quondam psychologist can speak up without feeling too de-fensive. There are many ways of dividing and subdividing the rapidly expanding world of science. We have the earth sciences versus the life scienceis. We have the physical sciences versus the behavioral sciences. But Elton Mayo, of Harvard, has divided the sciences into the "successful" and the "unsuccessful." Into the former category he put chemistry and physics; into the latter he put psychology and economics. That was some time ago, and this state of affairs is not going to last forever. The behavioral sciences, so far, justify inclusion in the "unsuccessful" sciences, in the sense that they have more unknowns in them than they have equations with which to solve them. But foir the very reasions which Dr. Drake called forth, the medical sciences, so-called, also belong among the "unsuccessful" sciences because, despite medicine's enormous content of science, it is also an art. It is interesting to a layman to take a ba,ckward glance at the history of medical education in this country. In modern times, I suppose, the opening of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital in 1893 was a ma,jor landmark, with the, emergence of those four great men of medicine-Welch, Osler, Halsted, and Kelly. So high had the standards of admission been set that one of Welch's principal worries was whether anyone would arrive to be taught, and Osler said to Halsted, so the story goes, "It is very fortunate we are here as professors, for I greatly doubt if we could qualify as students." And there is that other landmark: the Flexner Report. It is not very long ago in the scale of history that the Flexner Report on medical education turned things upside down, and this nat.ion assumed concern for the kind and quali.ty of medical education which was to place American physicians and surgeons at the very top of the world's best in their technical skill and qualifications. It is not for me to say why another problem sometime thereafter began to beset medical eidncation and medical practice, nor could I even say with accuracy when the Age of the Specialist dawned in this country. But certainly there was a time which has not yet drawn to, a close when the general practitioner who ha.d once been the mainstay of American medicine declined almost to the role oif the preliminary classifier, whose principal function became th.at of referring the patient to the man who knew all the neek or the knee joint and almost prided This paper is based on a talk given at the dedication of the Stanford Medical Center, Palo Alto, Calif. Dr. Stanton is president of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., and former chairman, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.