Resources available for maintenance: Fees only, amounting to $4500 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: Practically none at all: hopelessly meager appointments in two rooms are denominated respectively chemical and pathological laboratories. Dissection was not in progress at the time of the visit. It is held that "students ought to know anatomy before they dissect,—they get more out of it." A single cadaver was dissected in September and October; another was expected in February.
Clinical facilites: A pay-dispensary is operated, senior students giving "treatments" to patients who pay three dollars a month. Students may on payment of fee attend public clinics at the City Hospital, but the school has no hospital facilities or connections of its own at all.
Date of visit: November, 1909.
KIRKSVILLE: Population, 8422.
(5) American School of Osteopathy.. Established 1892 and owned by two individuals.
Entrance requirement: Less than a common school education.
Attendance: 560 (ranging in age from 18 to 54 years).
Teaching staff: 12 with 11 student assistants.
Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $89,600 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: These are absurdly inadequate for the number of students, as is likewise the teaching staff. A single room, with a corresponding preparation room, is used as bacteriological and physiological laboratory, a six weeks' course being given by one teacher to successive squads of 32. In the same way separate additional laboratories are provided for chemistry, anatomy, and pathology. Material for pathological demonstration is bought; there is no museum, and no effort is made to save gross material. The dissecting-room is foul. The "professors" in charge of histology, pathology, and bacteriology are senior students.
Clinical facilities: A hospital of 55 beds adjoins, but its work is practically all "surgery;" the ward cases are "occasionally used for clinics. Students witness operations." Obstetrical work is comparatively scanty. There is no other hospital in the town.
A large dispensary is operated. An instructor is at hand the first time the student administers a "treatment; after that, "only if summoned." A course of twenty lectures on the fallacies of medicine is given, so that the graduate will know why he does not use "drugs."
