An important pioneer in the creation of medicine's scientific base in America was Samuel J. Meltzer. A distinguished promoter of the application of experimental methods to clinical research, Meltzer made his most significant contributions in the borderland between medical science and medical practice. He was able to combine in an extraordinary manner the life of the practitioner and the life of the real specialist in exper-imental physiology. He was a firm believer in the value of learned societies for the stimulation of creative thought and activity and was a leading figure in the organization of several of the present-day Ameri-can societies for medical research.

Early Life in Europe Samuel James Meltzer was born ofJewish parents on March 22, 1851, in northwestern Russia. He married at the age of 20, and in the fall of 1876 he moved with his family to Berlin, where he remained as a student of medicine for the next 5 years. These were lean years financially, and the family lived in an attic room, spending as little as possible of their meager income on food and clothing in order to pay for his medical courses at the university. He studied under the outstanding German professors of that era—DuBois-Reymond, Virchow, Helmholtz, Friedländer, and others. It is not difficult to imagine how the eager mind of young Meltzer must have been deeply stimulated by such masters. How-ever, the one who exercised the greatest influence on his future career was the physiologist Hugo Kronecker, with whom Meltzer developed a strong friendship. With his attractive, friendly personality, his devotion to experimental science, and his thorough training in physiology under Helmholtz and Ludwig and in medicine under Traube, Kronecker was the ideal guide for a younger man beginning a scientific career. In fact,