Dr. Abel's first task was to fit up a laboratory, inasmuch as there had never been any provision made for experimental work in the old Department of Materia Medica. Not only was there no room, but there was not a single piece of apparatus, not even a piece of glassware. He finally secured a small room with a sloping ceiling, situated in a corner of the rear of the old Medical Building under the lower amphitheater. The necessary glassware was borrowed from Professor Paul C. Freer of the Department of Chemistry, and the physiological apparatus was built partly by Dr. Abel, with the aid of his assistant, Archibald Muirhead, and partly by the University mechanics. For the remainder of the year he lectured for an hour daily to a class that included, besides the medical students, the students in pharmacy and in dentistry. As it was not found satisfactory to include the dental and pharmacy students in the same class with the medical students, a separation was effected, and the following year the dental and pharmacy faculties assumed responsibility for the instruction of their own students in the subject.
During the academic year 1891-92 Abel was given additional laboratory space — a fairly large room in the southeast corner of the second floor of the Old Medical Building.
In the course of the year he organized a journal club, inviting ten to fifteen of the better students to meet with him at intervals to discuss more in detail than was possible in class and laboratory the various problems and aims of pharmacology. He was interested also in bringing a knowledge of pharmacology to the attention of practicing physicians. Accordingly, he arranged a lecture and demonstration for the physicians of Ann Arbor, and, later, a similar lecture and demonstration were given to the physicians of Detroit. These lectures were published in an article in the Pharmaceutical Era in 1891. The period of Dr. Abel's service to the University of Michigan was destined not to be long, for in 1893, when the faculty of the medical school of Johns Hopkins University was being organized, he was invited to become one of its members as professor of pharmacology and professor in charge of physiological chemistry.
It is evident that, even though Abel's term was short, his service to the Medical Department of the University was of the greatest importance. He was one of the first of the remarkable group of men that Dean Vaughan gathered from far and wide to form his faculty in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In Abel, Vaughan had the founder of the first department primarily for the teaching of pharmacology in this country. In him also he had a powerful supporter of his efforts to reorganize the Department of Medicine and Surgery upon a true University basis. This support was not confined to routine teaching and research activities, but was extended outside the lecture room to the Journal Club, the Scientific Club, and to medical men engaged in active practice.
After Abel's resignation Dean Vaughan appealed again to Schmiedeberg, the professor of pharmacology at Strassburg, to send him a man to succeed Abel. Schmiedeberg recommended for the position one of his assistants, Arthur Robertson Cushny (A.M. Aberdeen '86, M. Surg. ibid. '89, M.D. ibid. '92, LL.D. Michigan '25). After his graduation from the University of Aberdeen he had been given a University fellowship to work with the physiologist Kronecker at Bern, and upon the completion of this year's work, went to Strassburg, where he spent two years studying with Schmiedeberg.
Cushny came to the University in the
