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MEDICAL EDUCATION

Entrance requirement: Nominal.

Attendance: 81, 59 per cent from Arkansas.

Teaching staff: 34, 25 being professors.

Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $6450 (estimated).

Laboratory facilities: Separate, recently organized, and very disorderly laboratories for pathology, bacteriology, and chemistry, which with pharmacy work are all in charge of a single teacher, who is also pathologist to the County Hospital, three miles off. He proposes shortly to add physiology. The usual wretched dissecting-room is also provided. None of the necessary illustrative paraphernalia are at hand in the shape of books, charts, museum, etc.

Clinical facilities: The faculty of the school controls an adjoining hospital, from which patients are brought into the amphitheater for demonstration or operation. At operations it is claimed that students assist. No ward rounds are made. Occasional clinics are also held at two distant hospitals (county and penitentiary). Obstetrical and acute medical cases are rare; contagious diseases are not seen. There are no post-mortems. A small daily dispensary attendance is claimed. There is no adequate dispensary equipment.

Date of visit: November, 1909.

General Considerations

Both the Arkansas schools are local institutions in a state that has at this date three times as many doctors as it needs; neither has a single redeeming feature. It is incredible that the state university should permit its name to shelter one of them. The general educational interests of the state require that the state university, now inconveniently located at Fayetteville, should be moved to Little Rock. Once there, it could probably get possession of both schools and organize something better than either, which it could improve as its resources increase with the general prosperity of the state.

California[1]

Population, 1,729,543. Number of physicians (exclusive of ostcopaths), 4313. Ratio, 1: 401.

Number of medical schools, 10.

LOS ANGELES: Population, 116,420.

(1) College of Physicians and Surgeons. Established 1903 as an independent

  1. The Director of the Census states: "The cities of Los Angeles, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco have 'had such an exceptionally rapid increase that no estimates of their population have been prepared." The figures given are taken from the census of 1900.