work begins November 15, but students have until January 8 before even calling on that functionary. Even Michigan wavers here: for March 1, 1910, had come around before all the first-year students of the Detroit School of Medicine had satisfied the state board. In such cases the requirement may be preliminary to graduation, or to practice, or to what-not; it is absurd to regard it as preliminary to medical education. For the whole purpose of a preliminary is to guarantee a certain degree of training, maturity, and knowledge before the student crosses the threshold of the medical school, on the ground that he is not fit to cross the threshold without it; and this purpose is abandoned if he is allowed to enter without it and subsequently, by hook or crook, in hastily snatched moments, to go through the form of a perfunctory compliance that becomes complete some time before he comes up for his M.D. degree. There is no retroactive virtue in such a feat. Educational futility can go no farther. A high school "preliminary requirement," scrappily accumulated as a side issue incidental to attendance in the medical school, is worse than nothing to the extent that it has interfered with undivided attention to medical study.[1]
To all the disorder that prevails in schools of this grade in the United States, the Canadian schools at the same level present, with two exceptions,[2] a forcible contrast. There, too, "equivalents" are accepted; but they are equivalents in fact as in name, for they are probed by a series of written examinations, each three hours in length, held at a stated time and place, only and actually in advance of the opening of the medical school, entrance to which is absolutely dependent on their outcome.
The quality of the student body thus accumulated in the schools under discussion bears out the above description. "The facilities are better than the students;" "the boys are imbued with the idea of being doctors; they want to cut and prescribe; all else is theoretical;" students accepted in chemistry or physics "don't know a barometer when they see it;" "it is difficult to get a student to want to repeat an experiment (in physiology). They have neither curiosity nor capacity." "The machinery does n't stop the unfit." "Men get in, not because the country needs the doctors, but because the schools need the money." "What is your honest opinion of your own enrolment?" a professor in a Philadelphia school was asked. "Well, the most I would claim," he answered, "is that nobody who is absolutely worthless gets in"!
- ↑ Some state boards are already in possession of the legal right to enforce a preliminary requirement. The Illinois law, for example, says: "The State Board of Health shall be empowered to establish a standard of preliminary education deemed requisite to admission to a medical college in good standing" (par. 6 b, ch. 91, Hurd's Revised Statutes, 1908). The board is apparently free to refuse examination to any applicant whose completed entrance certificate does not bear date four years prior to his M.D. diploma. The present policy of the Illinois board thus squarely contravenes the obvious intention of the statute. Contrast with this lax procedure the Scotch requirement: "The student must within fifteen days of the commencement of study, obtain registration." (Regulations for the Triple Qualification, ch. i. § 2.)
- ↑ Laval University, Montreal, which admits students below grade; but they must come to the United States to practise, for they have no standing in Canada; and Western University, London, Ont., which leaves the entire question to the discretion of the student, who, it is supposed, will conform to the local requirement of the place in which he expects to settle.
