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on the attitude. It seems to me, though a slight affair, as significant
as
anything in my experience while in Germany. I was dining with an old
friend,
a professor in the University of Berlin. There were present his wife, a
friend of hers who is the daughter of one of the most distinguished
Jewish scientists of thirty years ago (the only 'non-Aryan'), a pupil
of my friend now an assistant to him, and a pleasant, intelligent
medical professor from a provincial university whom I had never seen
before. After some general conversation about conditions in the United
States which was not without personal significance because one daughter
of the Jewess is already in America and another expects to go to
America soon, the medical professor said to me something like this,
"About 1910 when as an assistant I first began to see American medical
men, we found it necessary to make great allowances for them because
although they were good fellows their education and training had
obviously been defective and they were clearly behind the best
Europeans of the same age. Today we look to America as leading the
world in medical science. How has such progress been possible in a
quarter of a century? How far has it been due to pouring out money?" It
was quite apparent that his question was really the expression of a
hope that something like this might some day be possible in Germany.
 
 
 To this question I replied about as follows: "We have indeed made
great progress in America, but nothing like what your question implies.
You are largely in error for two reasons: (1) You and practically all
Germans greatly underestimated the achievements of American science 25
years
ago. (2) Today you considerably overestimate our achievements and our
present merits. In short, you arrive at far too great an estimate of
our progress by subtracting a quantity that is much too small from a
quantity that is much