Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/248

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220
MEDICAL EDUCATION

(2) Southwestern Homeopathic Medical College. Organized 1892. An independent school.

Entrance requirement: The same as that of the University of Louisville Medical Department.

Attendance: 13.

Teaching staff: 27, 12 being professors.

Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $1100.

Laboratory facilities: There is no outfit worth speaking of in any department; the building is wretchedly dirty, especially the room said to be used for anatomy. There is nothing to indicate recent dissecting.

Clinical facilities: The school gets one-fifth of the patients admitted to the City Hospital and can use them for demonstrative purposes.

There is no organized dispensary.

Date of visit: January, 1909.

(3) Louisville National Medical Collegel (Colored). An independent school, organized 1888, now affiliated with the colored State University.

Entrance requirement: Less than high school education.

Attendance: 40.

Teaching staff: 23, of whom 17 are professors.

Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $2560.

Laboratory facilities: Nominal.

Clinical facilities: A small and scrupulously clean hospital of 8 beds is connected with the school.

Date of visit: January, 1909.

General Considerations

The situation in Kentucky is a simple one. The homeopathic school is without merit. Its graduates deserve no recognition whatsoever, for it lacks the most elementary teaching facilities. The University of Louisville has a large, scattered plant, unequal to the strain which numbers put upon it. In the old days, Louisville, with a half-dozen "regular" schools, was a popular medical center, to which crude boys thronged from the plantations. The schools offered little beyond didactic teaching. Now, they have been arithmetically added together; the resulting school is indeed superior on the laboratory side to any of its component parts; but there are radical defects for which there is no cure in sight. The classes are unmanageably huge; the laboratories overcrowded and undermanned; clinical facilities, meager at best, broken into bits in order to be distributed among the aggregated faculty. To carry the school at all,