Entrance requirement: A four-year high school education.
Attendance: 58, 91 per cent from New England.
Teaching staff: 24, of whom 17 are professors, 7 of other grade. There are two prolessors giving entire time to medical subjects, viz., pathology, bacteriology, and physiology. Chemistry, botany, embryoIogy, and comparative anatomy are taught in the regular college laboratories. Ten clinical professors and one lecturer are non-resident.
Resources available for maintenance: The department is carried by the general resources of Dartmouth College The income in fees is $5583 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: Excellent working laboratories are provided for pathology, bacteriology, histology, physiology, and for the medical subjects cared for in the academic department. Every student serves four weeks during his second year as assistant in the pathological laboratory and thus gets an admirable practical experience. Anatomy, taught by a practitioner, has not as yet been developed on modem lines. There are good departmental libraries, supplied with books and current periodicals, foreign and domestic.
Clinical facilities: These are very limited. The college controls a hospital of 40 beds, of which 24 are in wards at reduced rates. These are available for teaching; to some extent private cases may also be detnonstratively used. Still further to weaken the teaching value of the hospital, surgery predominates to the extent of 80 per cent of all cases. Students are employed to assist in surgical operations, but the backbone of clinical instruction—an adequate clinic in internal medicine—is lacking.
An isolation pavilion of fourteen beds for college use is employed for teaching as occasion presents. For obstetrical work, students sojourn for a period in Boston or New York. There are 12-14 post-mortems a year.
There is no dispensary.
Date of visit: March, 1910.
General Considerations
Dartmouth is already providing excellent modern instruction in most of the work of the first two years. The development of its clinical work presents a serious difficulty. The village is rather inaccessible; the surrounding country is thinly populated,–containing perhaps 50,000 people in a zone 100 miles north and south. Surgical cases are attracted easily enough. Can medical cases be attracted too? Certainly not without a very large outlay in the form of professional salaries and hospital expense. To what extent a compulsory fifth year spent as interne in a large hospital would answer in compensation of defective facilities is a question: much depends on the hospitals available for the purpose. That the school cannot much longer continue in its present stage is clear: for with the requirement of two years of college work
