Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/104

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86
MEDICAL EDUCATION

It is indeed stretching terms to speak of laboratory teaching in connection with them at all.[1] It is hardly more than make-believe; in the better schools, a futile imitation, without actual bearing on the subsequent clinical work; in others, a grudging compliance with the state board behest; occasionally there is nothing at all. The Mississippi Medical College (Meridian) did not, when visited,[2] own a dollar's worth of apparatus of any description whatsoever; the pathological laboratories of the Chattanooga Medical College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, San Francisco, rejoice in the possession of one microscope apiece; Halifax Medical College provides one utterly wretched laboratory for bacteriology and pathology; the Toledo school has a meager equipment in one or two branches, but for the rest is bare; the Detroit Homeopathic College has a dirty and disorderly room, with a few dozen wet specimens, that is called the pathological laboratory; at the Milwaukee Medical College, bacteriology is represented mainly by several wire baskets of dirty test tubes; Temple University (Philadelphia) has no individual outfit for students in any science at all; the Chicago National Medical University is practically as bare as the Meridian school; the eclectic school at Lincoln, Nebraska, pretends to give clinical instruction in Lincoln, laboratory instruction at Cotner University, a few miles from town. When questions are asked in Lincoln regarding physiology or pathology, the answer is made: "That is given at Cotner;" when the same question is asked at Cotner, it is answered: "That is given at Lincoln." A quick transit from one to the other failed to find anything at either. Prestidigitation is, however, familiar enough in schools of this grade. Entrance credentials in the college safe frequently vanish as it is being opened: why should not equipment similarly resent inspection? At the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Denver, the outfit in pathology and bacteriology was mostly stored in a certain compartment under a table. There was some difficulty and delay in opening it; by the time the key was found, everything had disappeared except an empty demijohn and some jugs, obviously too clumsy to whisk themselves away in such airy fashion. At Willamette University (Salem, Oregon) "physiology is taught experimentally." The apparatus? "That is kept in a physician's office downtown." At the Eclectic Medical College of New York an inquiry was made as to the teaching of experimental physiology, no outfit for which had been noticed in the course of the inspection. A mere oversight! A messenger was despatched to fetch it, and did—a single small black box, of about the size and appearance of a safety-razor case, containing a small sphygmograph. "Good standing" requires the schools of St. Louis and Chicago to own a certain equipment in experimental physiology. They do; it is displayed prominently on tables, brand new, like samples shown for sale on a counter; the various parts had never been put together or connected at the College of Physicians and Surgeons or at the Hippo-

  1. e.g., Western University (London, Ont.), Halifax Medical College, University of Arkansas, Southwestern University (Dallas, Texas), Fort Worth University, Epworth University (Oklahoma City). Other examples are given in the text.
  2. January 12, 1909. It was then in its third year,