have been willing enough to build; but in the matter of equipment they have usually yielded as little as they could. The conclusive evidence of lack of educational conscience- or pride is the general absence of a decent museum.[1] Material, of course, abounds, the expense involved is slight; but the practitioner simply will not take the trouble. The College of Physicians and Surgeons (Baltimore), Georgetown University (Washington), Long Island College Hospital (Brooklyn), the medical department of Valparaiso University, the Chicago Hahnemann, Ensworth (St. Joseph, Missouri), are among the schools that have little or nothing in the way of a museum at all. Such specimens as one meets are often putrid, rarely labeled properly, and still more rarely catalogued. But a few exceptions may be fortunately noted: the great anatomical and pathological museum at McGill has already been mentioned. To the same class belong the excellent collections made by Souchon at Tulane and by Keiller at Galveston (University of Texas). A small but beautifully mounted collection at Boston University is once more an evidence of what conscience and intelligence will achieve despite slender financial resources.
Practically the same may be said on the subject of books. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago and the Medical College of Virginia have small working libraries; but in general no funds are set aside for the purchase of books. The school grind is merrily independent of medical literature. The University of Maryland possesses indeed a large library under a separate roof, but the building was unheated when visited in midwinter, and at best it is open only two hours a day. Denver and Gross (Denver, Colorado) and the Medico-Chirurgical College of Philadelphia have limited accumulations of textbooks and cheap medical periodicals;[2] Long Island and Albany have no books at all. In the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Los Angeles, the word "Library is prominently painted on a door which, on being opened, reveals a class-room innocent of a single volume. Once more it is pleasant to record exceptions: a good library, excellently administered, is to be found at Jefferson, at Buffalo, and at Galveston.
In the matter of laboratory equipment and work, our progress may be facilitated by simple elimination. None of these schools has laboratories of pharmacology; in consequence, their teaching of materia medica and therapeutics is wholly on didactic lines. Only a few of them—the Medico-Chirurgical (Philadelphia), University of Maryland (Baltimore), the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Chicago—are well equipped to do either demonstrative or experimental work in physiology; as a rule, physiology is still didactically presented with a varying amount of experimental demonstration. The general laboratory equipment is therefore limited to chemistry, anatomy, pathology, and 'bacteriology.
