year. This course was well calculated to round off the young doctor's preparation, reviewing and systematizing his theoretical acquisitions, while considerably extending his practical experience.
Before the outbreak of the Revolution, the young medical school was prosperously started on its career. The war of course brought interruption and confusion. More unfortunate still, for the time being, was the local rivalry—ominous as the first of its kind—of the newly established medical department of the University of Pennsylvania; but wise counsels averted disaster, and in 1791 the two institutions joined to form a single faculty, bearing, as it still bears, the name of the university,—the earliest of a long and yet incomplete series of medical school mergers. Before the close of the century three more "medical institutes," similar in style, had been started: one in 1768 in New York, as the medical department of King's College, which, however, temporarily collapsed on the British occupation and was only indirectly restored to vigor by union in 1814 with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, begun by the Regents in 1807; another, the medical department of Harvard College, opened in Cambridge in 1783, and twenty-seven years later removed to Boston so as to gain access to the hospitals there;[1] last of the group, the medical department of Dartmouth College, started in 1798 by a Harvard graduate, Dr. Nathan Smith, who was himself for twelve years practically its entire faculty—and a very able faculty at that.
The sound start of these early schools was not long maintained. Their scholarly ideals were soon compromised and then forgotten. True enough, from time to time seats of learning continued to create medical departments,—Yale in 1810, Transylvania in 1817, among others. But with the foundation early in the nineteenth century at Baltimore of a proprietary school, the so-called medical department of the so-called University of Maryland,[2] a harmful precedent was established.[3] Before that a college of medicine had been a branch growing out of the living university trunk.
- ↑ The removal took place in 1810. But definite arrangements for clinical teaching long remained vague. Dr. R. C. Cabot quotes the Harvard Catalogue of 1833 as follows: "The lectures for medical students are delivered in Boston. . . . During lecture the students may find in the city various opportunities for practical instruction." A hospital is first mentioned in 1835, when it is stated that students may attend the medical visits at the Massachusetts General Hospital." R. C. Cabot: "Sketch of the Development of the Department of Clinical Medicine", in Harvard Medical Alumni Quarterly, Jan., 1905, p. 666.
- ↑ In recent years an effort has been made to fill out the non-existent university by an affiliation with St. John's College (Annapolis), whereby it becomes nominally the department of arts of the University of Maryland. This is, of course, a makeshift. A university begins with a school of arts and sciences; it cannot be formed of loosely associated schools of dentistry, pharmacy, and even law, whether with or without still looser connection with a remote college of arts. Analogous in type are the so-called medical departments of the Universities of Buffalo, Toledo, and Memphis, which at this writing still lack academic affiliation. Their titles cannot disguise the fact that they are in essence independent medical schools, nor does a university charter make a university.
- ↑ This was in imitation of London, as against the Edinburgh or the Leyden example, followed by the four earlier schools. But the London schools never conferred the degree or gave the right to practise: for the bestowal of degrees is the function of a university, the qualification for practice is determined by the state. The American departure in both these respects developed evils from which England has never suffered.
