professors. The laboratory movement is comparatively recent; and Thomas Bond's wise words about clinical teaching were long since out of print. Little or no investment was therefore involved. A hall could be cheaply rented and rude benches were inexpensive. Janitor service was unknown and is even now relatively rare. Occasional dissections in time supplied a skeleton—in whole or in part—and a box of odd bones. Other equipment there was practically none. The teaching was, except for a little anatomy, wholly didactic. The schools were essentially private ventures, moneymaking in spirit and object. A school that began in October would graduate a class the next spring; it mattered not that the course of study was two or three years; immigration recruited a senior class at the start.[1]
Income was simply divided among the lecturers, who reaped a rich harvest, besides, through the consultations which the loyalty of their former students threw into their hands. "Chairs" were therefore valuable pieces of property, their prices varying with what was termed their "reflex" value: only recently a professor in a now defunct Louisville school, who had agreed to pay $3000 for the combined chair of physiology and gynecology, objected strenuously to a division of the professorship assigning him physiology, on the ground of "failure of consideration;" for the "reflex" which constituted the inducement to purchase went obviously with the other subject.[2] No applicant for instruction who could pay his fees or sign his note was turned down. State boards were not as yet in existence. The school diploma was itself a license to practise. The examinations, brief, oral, and secret, plucked almost none at all; even at Harvard, a student for whom a majority of nine professors "voted" was passed.[3] The man who had settled his tuition bill was thus practically assured of his degree, whether he had regularly attended lectures or not. Accordingly, the business throve. Rivalry between different so-called medical centers was ludicrously bitter. Still more acrid were—and occasionally are—the local animosities bound to arise in dividing or endeavoring to monopolize the spoils. Sudden and violent feuds thus frequently disrupted the faculties. But a split was rarely fatal: it was more likely to result in one more school. Occasionally, a single too masterful individual became the strategic object of a hostile faculty combination. Daniel Drake, indomitable pioneer in medical education up and down the Ohio Valley, thus tasted the ingratitude of his colleagues. As presiding officer of the faculty of the Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati, cornered by a cabal of men, only a year since indebted to him for their professorial titles and profits, he was compelled to put a motion for his own expulsion and to announce to his enemies a large major-
- ↑ This is recent as well as ancient history, e.g.:
Tufts College Medical School opened 1895 first class graduated 1894 Illinois Medical College " 1894 " " " 1895 Birmingham Medical College " 1894 " " " 1895 College of Physicians and Surgeons, Little Rock " 1905 " " " 1907 College of Physicians and Surgeons, Memphis " 1906 " " " 1907 - ↑ The sale of chairs is not even now wholly unknown. At the North Carolina Medical College (Charlotte, N. C.) the faculty owns the stock, and the sale of one's stock carries with it one's chair.
- ↑ There were at Harvard at one time only seven professors and an examination was conducted even if only a majority was present.
