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18

the vasopressor and a pressor for the dilator. In that way he was able to explain whatever happened. I was quite inexperienced in the world of research at that time and I was vastly impressed by this vascular microcosm conjured up by the inventor's wand. The only thing was, I couldn't decide whether I should believe it or not. Finally I asked somebody from P & S whether all of this had been confirmed in some other laboratory, to which he responded after what I took to be a certain hesitation, "He's carried it all so far that it would take someone else half a lifetime to repeat it and nobody is sufficiently interested to give the time to it." I gathered that most groups took a dim view of the whole story, although the journals published the paper, probably because they couldn't deny it any more than they could confirm it. So far as I know, the whole theory was lost sight of and to this day I don't know whether the author was an enthusiast, a prophet or an impostor. But that was a picturesque phenomenon of that period a curious exception in a history which, not so long before, had shown the discovery and isolation of insulin and the conquest, or at least control of pernicious anemia."

  "You don't think it's still that way, Doctor?  That is, that

creative discovery is going on all right, but that everything is bigger so the flaws in the system are more conspicuous?"

  "I wish I could think so, Inspector, but the evidence

seems to me pretty convincing that the same elements which are disrupting our schools and universities, our religion, our character and standards of morality - have penetrated that most sensitive of fields, namely, the profession of medicine. Of course there were flaws before, no question about that, but they were the ordinary human flaws and, as such, were understandable, even predictable. Good doctors and bad ones, wise ones and stupid ones those who were ambitious for the almighty dollar and