dards of admission to a profession can exclude all the unfit or furnish a perfect body of practitioners, but a reasonable enforcement of such standards will at least relieve the body politic of a large part of the difficulty which comes from over-production, and will safeguard the right of society to the service of trained men in the great callings which touch so closely our physical and political life.
The object of the Foundation in undertaking studies of this character is to serve a constructive purpose, not a critical one. Unless the information here brought together leads to constructive work, it will fail of its purpose. The very disappearance of many existing schools is part of the reconstructive process. Indeed, in the course of preparing the report a number of results have already come about which are of the highest interest from the constructive point of view. Several colleges, finding themselves unable to carry on a medical school upon right lines, have, frankly facing the situation, discontinued their medical departments, the result being a real gain to medical education. Elsewhere, competing medical schools which were dividing the students and the hospital facilities have united into a single school. In still other instances large sums of money have been raised to place medical education on a firmer basis.
In the preparation of this report the Foundation has kept steadily in view the interests of two classes, which in the over-multiplication of medical schools have usually been forgotten,—first, the youths who are to study medicine and to become the future practitioners, and, secondly, the general public, which is to live and die under their ministrations.
No one can become familiar with this situation without acquiring a hearty sympathy for the American youth who, too often the prey of commercial advertising methods, is steered into the practice of medicine with almost no opportunity to learn the difference between an efficient medical school and a hopelessly inadequate one. A clerk who is receiving $50 a month in the country store gets an alluring brochure which paints the life of the physician as an easy road to wealth. He has no realization of the difference between medicine as a profession and medicine as a business, nor as a rule has he any adviser at hand to show him that the first requisite for the modern practitioner of medicine is a good general education. Such a boy falls an easy victim to the commercial medical school, whether operating under the name of a university or college, or alone.
The interests of the general public have been so generally lost sight of in this matter that the public has in large measure forgot that it has any interests to protect. And yet in no other way does education more closely touch the individual than in the quality of medical training which the institutions of the country provide. Not only the personal well-being of each citizen, but national, state, and municipal sanitation rests upon the quality of the training which the medical graduate has received. The interest of the public is to have well trained practitioners in sufficient number for the needs of society. The source whence these practitioners are to come is of far less consequence.
