This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
120
MEDICAL EDUCATION

Meanwhile we are not without schools that have practically no hospital connection at all. The Mississippi Medical College (Meridian) has absolutely no hospital facilities or privileges of any sort whatsoever. The Georgia College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery (Atlanta), the California Eclectic Medical College (Los Angeles), are in the same plight. Others are hardly better: for example, the three Chicago night schools, one of which, the National Medical University, had two lonely patients on the top floor of the school-building, though claiming the usual relations with a private pay institution. Thrice happy for the nonce is the Hippocratean College of Medicine (St. Louis), a night school; it crosses no clinical bridges till it reaches them: as it is only three years old, it need not bother about hospital connections until next year! The Lincoln (Nebraska) Medical College deplores the fact that "there are no poor in Lincoln; hence students have no regular hours at any hospital, but depend on cases as they turn up." The Hahnemann Medical College of Chicago has two surgeons on the Cook County Hospital stair and a hospital of 60 beds; but the lay superintendent "does n't believe in admitting students to the wards, so that there is no regular way for them to see common acute diseases." The College of Physicians and Surgeons, Denver, had access to a hospital of 8 beds, "certain ones free." The medical school at Little Rock that trades on the name of the University of Arkansas, with which it is not even affiliated, is connected by a bridge with a city hospital that has a capacity of from twenty-five to thirty-five patients, some of whom are occasionally transported across into the amphitheater for operation or exhibition. The clinics of the medical department of Willamette University (Salem, Oregon) are somewhat intangible: whether medical clinics are held, and where, "depends on the cases." Not infrequently, schools advertise varied hospital connections that prove on investigation to be baseless or surreptitious. The Philadelphia College of Osteopathy claims "the freedom of every important surgical clinic in the great medical colleges and hospitals" of that city. Its hospital list is almost a page long; at the top stand the University and Jefferson Hospitals, to which its students can gain access only by concealing their identity. Rights or privileges they have none. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Boston announces that "equal opportunities and privileges are available in the hospitals and institutions" of that city,—a flagrant misstatement; for the students of that institution can on payment of fee attend only certain public clinics of little value.

It is unnecessary to describe dispensary conditions in equal detail: naturally they parallel the hospital situation. The same clinicians are responsible for both; in general, the dispensaries would be likely, therefore, to reflect the same degree of intelligence and conscientiousness. A teaching dispensary needs ample space, equipment for making the necessary diagnostic examinations and for taking simple therapeutic or surgical measures on the spot, a well organized staff, and a tho,ugh record system, in the keeping of which students serve as clerks. Voluminous attendance is an advantage, because it permits selection in the first place, repeated illustration of important conditions in