Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/156

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188
MEDICAL EDUCATION

time it was a highly prosperous concern to its managers; nowhere in the country were worse conditions found. Now, as then, the school has only its fees for support; but they have this year gone into laboratories instead of into professorial pockets: with a result that is hardly less than a transformation. Full-time professors of pathology, physiology, and other branches have brought order out of chaos. The entire atmosphere of the institution has been clarified: students may be found actually studying, in the room in which under other conditions last year “four dozen wooden chairs were broken up”in boisterous horse-play. The medical department of Boston University, with a total income of $12,762, makes a decent and attractive showing in a simple way in its laboratories of bacteriology, pathology, physiology, etc. Highly creditable is the record of Meharry Medical College, the colored school at Nashville; for there the teachers, though practising physicians, are poor men: of the total income of $23,946, the salary list gets only $9665. A violent contrast is afforded by Shaw University (Raleigh, N. C.), another school for colored men, whose teachers are, however, white physicians: its income from fees is $2846; a few contributions increase the total income (not counting the board of students) to $4721; the teachers just referred to draw out $4737. In consequence the school has practically no outfit.

In the majority of the larger schools dependent on fees, an opposite policy is pursued. The laboratories are slighted or starved; the dispensary is neglected in order that dividends or salaries, running sometimes as high as $1000, may be paid to precisely those faculty members who need it least. The Albany Medical School—nominally affiliated with Union College—has a fee income of $20,276. Associated with it is the Bender Laboratory, where practically all its laboratory teaching except chemistry and anatomy is carried on. The school appropriates niggardly sums to provide for the teaching of pathology and bacteriology by the overworked and underhelped chief of the Bender Laboratory; the laboratory has struggled hard, and not unsuccessfully, to be productive at the same time; but it has accomplished, whether in teaching or in research, but a fraction of what it would have achieved, had not a large part of the college receipts been distributed in sums approximating $500 each to fifteen members of the school faculty. At Buffalo similar conditions exist. The dispensary is utterly neglected; some laboratory subjects are unprovided, others are slighted, in order that a “nominal” salary of $1000 may be paid in real money to some of the leading practitioners in the town. This institution collects $4608 in laboratory fees and spends $1105 in carrying the laboratories on. Brooklyn fairly repeats Albany. There the Hoagland Laboratory relieves the Long Island College Hospital of certain subjects; the rest are omitted, for the fees that might furnish them are distributed among well-to-do clinical teachers. Bowdoin, with a total available income of $15,230, appropriates $200 for the maintenance of the bacteriological laboratory, $50 for the physiological laboratory, $200 for chemistry, and $200 for books, as against $12,225 for salaries to men, not one of whom gives his whole