1898

Your secretary has visited Melvin Smith and Fred Lord in their new houses in Dunedin, Fla. He found both the Smiths and Lords looking much better and apparently feeling better than a year ago. The Smith house is a most charming Florida type house finely situated with a large patio and lined with palm trees, a delightful home. Fred's house in another part of Dunedin is of an entirely different type but mighty fine. Situated back from the road, it has in its yard trees now laden with grapefruit and other tropical growth. They are both most happily situated.

For several years Fred Lord in his retirement has been writing a book introducing a new method of instruction in anatomy to get away from the usual procedure of learning Gray's Anatomy by rote. During the past summer he completed the first version of the book and is now engaged in its revision. He was asked to tell something about it for these notes and he did as follows:

"Anatomy has been taught largely by the method of rote learning, however it may have been alleviated by witty lectures in the earlier days or by laboratory procedures in the later days. I have long believed that this is not the best way to get the facts of anatomical structure into the heads of medical students, and have these facts remain in situ. More and more in my 40-odd years of teaching anatomy I have been trying to impart the necessary facts to my students from the angle of the function that each part has to perform, as its structure must conform to its function. The activity, or function, of any part is pretty well known by the student, and, under the guidance of a few fundamental principles of correlation between structure and function, his reasoning can fairly readily anticipate and explain the characteristic structure of all parts of the body. Such a process is a logical one, appeals to the student's mind, correlates itself with many manifestations which he already knows or soon comes to know and enables him to learn much of the structure of the human body naturally and rationally in such a fashion that the facts tend to remain with him for a long time. In brief, the student acquires the habit of asking himself 'Why is such and such so constructed ?' His answer will be that it is so constructed in order to perform such and such a purpose. This process of thinking is reversible and the structure may be fairly well divined simply from knowing what it is destined to do.

"All of this I am trying to put into written form for the future medical student, who is entitled to any and every alleviation of the process of acquiring information about the human body that can be given him. It is a labor of love, so far as I am concerned, but it is a labor of magnitude, also, and I want to finish what I have started as I think it is greatly needed."

This is the time when you may lighten Jack Spring's work in connection with the Alumni Fund by sending in your donations early and on his first call.

Secretary and Treasurer, 811 N. Fort Harrison Ave., Clearwater, Fla.

Class Agent, 86 Main St., Nashua, N. H.