Teaching staff: 74, of whom 22 are professors, 52 of other grade.
Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $14,975.
Laboratory facilities: The school was recently destroyed by fire and now occupies temporary laboratory quarters.
Clinical facilities: These are inadequate. The school adjoins its own hospital, with less than 50 beds available for teaching. Supplementary facilities are enjoyed elsewhere. An out-patient obstetrical service is well organized.
The dispensary has a fair attendance.
Date of visit: February, 1909.
General Considerations
The destruction by fire of the University College of Medicine at Richmond should precipitate the consolidation of the two independent schools. Separately neither of them can hope greatly to improve its present facilities, which, weak in respect to laboratories and laboratory teaching, are entirely inadequate on the clinical side. Their present hospitals utilized together, though still unsatisfactory, would at any rate be much more nearly adequate than is either hospital taken by itself; and the combined fees would furnish much better laboratory training than either school now gives. A single independent school of the better type might still have in Virginia a brief term of prosperity,—the more so as the medical department of the University of Virginia is on a considerably higher basis.
The rapid improvement of the medical department of the University of Virginia in the last three years is one of the striking phenomena of recent medical school history. The limitations of Charlottesville have been acutely felt; the university is pursuing the course calculated to surmount them. It faces indeed a much greater outlay than it has yet made, for larger clinics in internal medicine and obstetrics must be developed. The alternative of a remote department diminishes difficulty of one kind only to create difficulty of another. A remote department at Norfolk or Richmond would of course command abundant clinical material; but could it preserve university ideals? The present resources of the university are not large enough to stand the strain of such liberal support as a remote department needs if it is to be genuinely productive. The experience of a few years warrants the belief that a clinic in most lines, for a school of 200 students, can be developed at Charlottesville if the university can afford it. Graduating classes of 50 easily suffice for Virginia's demand. At any rate, so much is evident: in Virginia, as elsewhere, the teaching of medicine will fall to the universities; and at this writing, the only institution available is the University of Virginia.
