Untitled This editorial appeared in the 4 November 1916 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. To heal the sick and to prevent disease and death are the services to society to which the physician devotes himself. Just so far as he is capable of performing these functions, he is under obligation to perform them. But the ability of medical men to cure or check disease is often limited because the nature of the disease and suitable methods of treating it are still unknown. On every side the effect of increased knowledge in giving increased power is manifest.
Greater knowledge is certain to yield greater ability to restore the sick to health.
Again, just so far as the physician is capable of doing so, he is as much under obligation to secure further knowledge and to diffuse it as he is under obligation to apply his skill to the individual in distress. This duty of learning is the warrant everywhere for the painstaking labors of the medical investigator, whether he is in the laboratory experimenting on animals, or in the hospital thoroughly and critically studying his patients. The duty of learning, the duty of making advances in diagnosis and treatment, is certain to involve the application of new methods or new medicaments. Fortunately, observations which can be made on animals offer reasonable assurance as to the safety of new procedures before they need to be tried on man. If a promising mode of diagnosis or treatment has been carefully worked out on lower animals, there appears to be no ethical objection to applying it to a human being who is in distress when it is reasonable to believe that its application would be beneficial.