For at least a generation, medicine was dominated by the great pathological school. During this era, American students flocked to the German universities, especially to Vienna, where the emperor had decreed that everyone dying in the General Hospital should have an autopsy, a great advantage over the American hospitals, where permission from the family of the deceased was required, and often refused. Osier, the leader of this school in the United States, was so successful in academic medicine that his type of training, that of a gross pathologist, was widely copied. When I was a student, every professor of medicine occupying an important chair in America had had extensive autopsy experience. In those days, the autopsy room was the center of the hospital's research activities, and the privilege of doing the autopsies was much sought after. The chiefs gathered there, and the clinicopathological conference was considered the last word in