80 to 90 per cent surgical, and can send its men to look on at the public clinics given in the City Hospital; the St. Louis students have a day a week at the City Hospital and profit occasionally elsewhere through professorial connection. All this is criminally inadequate, yet it is the best that the eclectics offer; for the other five schools have literally nothing at all. One of the Atlanta "colleges" is connected with a private infirmary; the other has not even such a semblance. The Los Angeles school claims "private hospitals only;" the Kansas City school claims to give clinics at the new City Hospital, but the hospital authorities deny it. At Lincoln "there are no regular hours at any hospital; they depend on cases as they turn up."
The dispensaries may be even more briefly described. The Atlanta, Lincoln, and Los Angeles schools have none at all. The Cincinnati school uses poorly the small dispensary at the Seton Hospital. The New York school has three rooms in its own building and access to another dispensary. At St. Louis there is one room and some one comes almost every day;" at Kansas City, one room likewise, with a present daily attendance of three and a confident aspiration that this number can be swelled to six.
The utter hopelessness of the future of these schools is apparent on a glance at their financial condition. All are dependent on fees. Only three of them—the New York, the Cincinnati, and one Atlanta school—enjoy an income between $5000 and $8500[1] a year; the St. Louis, Lincoln, and second Atlanta schools have something over $3000[1] annually; those at Los Angeles and Kansas City not much above $1000;[1] and these modest sums are not always spent within the schools. Statistics confirm the unfavorable prognosis: the ten schools which the sect possessed in 1901 have now dwindled to eight; a maximum enrolment of 1014 in 1904 has already shrunk to 413; graduates numbered 186 in 1906, 84 in 1909.
So far as sectarian creeds go, there is, of course, no reason why these schools should be elaborately equipped for scientific instruction. They talk of laboratories, not because they appreciate their place or significance, but because it pays them to defer thus far to the spirit of the times. Culpable indeed they are, however, for their utter failure to make good what their own tenets prescribe. The eclectics are drug mad; yet, with the exception of the Cincinnati and New York schools, none of them can do justice to its own creed. For they are not equipped to teach the drugs or the drug therapy which constitutes their sole reason for existence.[2]
The eight osteopathic schools[3] fairly reek with commercialism. Their catalogues are a mass of hysterical exaggerations, alike of the earning and of the curative power of osteopathy. It is impossible to say upon which score the "science" most confidently appeals to the crude boys or disappointed men and women whom it successfully
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Estimated.
- ↑ The physio-medical sect can be dismissed in a note. It had three schools in 1907; only one, that in Chicago, is left. The reader will find it described in Part II, under Illinois, no. (11). There were 149 physio-medical students in 1904; there are now 52; there were 20 graduates in that year, 15 in 1909.
- ↑ One school is found in each of the following cities: Chicago, Des Moines, Kirksville (Missouri), Kansas City (Missouri), Philadelphia, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and two at Los Angeles.
