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ILLINOIS
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by "coaching" one night a week in each of the several subjects: one evening is devoted to Latin, the next to English, the next to mathematics. There is absolutely no guarantee that the candidate accepted on the equivalent basis has had an education even remotely resembling the high school training which the Illinois law intends as the minimum upon which it will recognize a candidate for the physician's license. If the state board should—as in duty bound—publicly brand these schools as "not in good standing" by reason of their failure to require a suitable preliminary education of their students, their graduates would be immediately excluded from practice in Illinois; adjoining states would rapidly follow suit, with the result that the schools would shortly be exterminated. Fortunately, the case against them does not rest alone on the question of entrance requirements: for not a single one of the schools mentioned furnishes clinical opportunities in proper abundance, and some of them even fail to provide the stipulated training in other branches, e.g., anatomy. An efficient and intelligent administration of the law would thus reduce in short order the medical schools of Chicago to three, Rush, Northwestern, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons.[1] In the matter of entrance requirements, Rush alone is secure. The College of Physicians and Surgeons rests on the high school or equivalent basis; if a scholastic equivalent, such as would be acceptable to the academic department of the state university, is insisted on, the registration will be seriously diminished. Northwestern is in a similar plight: it requires now a high school education or equivalent, followed by a year of college which it does not get. If its standard were enforced, its present attendance would be considerably reduced. At both Northwestern and the College of Physicians and Surgeons the inequality and incapacity of the present student body are frankly conceded. "The facilities are better than the students," said a professor at the former; "the admission machinery doesn't stop the unfit," said a professor at the latter. That both these schools will be driven by internal and external forces to a higher level, actually enforced, is inevitable. When that happens, their attendance will materially shrink; and as higher standards will check the invasion of medical schools by drifting waverers, and will tend to keep the number of doctors in more nearly normal relation to the needs of the population, it is not likely that either school will again attain its former size. This consideration is rendered additionally important because it portends a marked reduction in income through fees, upon which both schools still depend.

In the matter of teaching facilities, the three schools under discussion satisfy the law; but they satisfy the aspirations of their faculties only in varying degrees. The scientific work of the University of Chicago, relied on by Rush, is excellent; the provision made by Northwestern and the College of Physicians and Surgeons is distinctly inferior to it. Assuming that Northwestern will rise to an actual one or two year college basis, it must provide correspondingly increased facilities both for the higher grade students and for the more productive teaching body which these students will

  1. For the American Medical Missionary College, see "Michigan."