Medical College, are weak; two others, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the University of Maryland, are large commercial enterprise whose financial responsibilities are far too extensive for their capital or fee income; the sums annually applicable to debts in order to simplify their position, or to maintenance in order to improve their teaching, are reduced by the payment of substantial dividends to practitioner teachers. Education is thus overshadowed by business. Entrance standards are low, the full-time teacher is practically unknown, the laboratories are slovenly, the atmosphere depressing.
Like Pennsylvania, Maryland has granted lump sums: to private corporations engaged in charitable work. The larger ones of the six medical schools mentioned have thus combined to obtain from the state money enough to build and partly to support their hospitals. Should the state ever conduct its philanthropic business intelligently, these irresponsible methods would stop; and with them, the medical schools which they have helped to float. The Johns Hopkins Medical School, for which neither the state of Maryland nor the city of Baltimore has ever done anything, is thus the only medical school in Maryland that either ought to or can live, and to its development greatly increased means should be freely devoted.
If, meanwhile, a combination of the better independent schools of Baltimore were effected, much of their property could be disposed of, the equity being used to equip the resulting institution. A single independent school might thus have a brief and not discreditable career. In the end, however, the independent schools will pass away, in Maryland as elsewhere. To their present hospitals the Johns Hopkins would become the heir, thus greatly strengthening its clinical resources. At this date the Johns Hopkins University is the only academic institution in the state capable of conducting a modern medical school. It would be safe, interesting, and instructive to leave medical education in Maryland for a decade or two wholly in its hands. The state will not meanwhile lack for doctors; it is already overcrowded.
The prerequisite to any reconstruction of the Baltimore situation is the revision of the state law. The country affords no more conclusive proof of the viciousness of the two-board system. Not only is neither state board empowered to enforce a preliminary educational requirement, but candidates refused by the "regular" board subsequently succeed before the homeopathic board. This underground traffic is responsible for the existence of the Atlantic Medical College, a homeopathic school that has rendered itself an attractive haven of refuge to rejected "regular" students by dropping the significant word from its title.
Massachusetts
Population, 3,162,347. Number of physicians, 5,577. Ratio, 1:567.
Number of medical schools, 5.
