John Morgan, who in 1765 proposed to the trustees of the College of Philadelphia the creation of a professorship in the theory and practice of medicine. At the ensuing Commencement, Morgan delivered a noble and prophetic discourse, still pertinent, upon the institution of medical schools in America. The trustees were favorable to the suggestion; the chair was established, and Morgan himself was its first occupant. Soon afterwards Shippen became professor of anatomy and surgery. Thirteen years previously the Pennsylvania Hospital, conceived by Thomas Bond, had been established through the joint effort of Bond himself and Benjamin Franklin. Realizing that the student "must Join Examples with Study, before he can be sufficiently qualified to prescribe for the sick, for Language and Books alone can never give him Adequate ideas of Diseases and the best methods of Treating them," Bond now argued successfully in behalf of bedside training for the medical students. "There the Clinical professor comes in to the Aid of Speculation and demonstrates the Truth of Theory by Facts, he declared in words that a century and a half later still warrant repetition; "he meets his pupils at stated times in the Hospital, and when a case presents adapted to his purpose, he asks all those Questions which lead to a certain knowledge of the Disease and parts Affected; and if the Disease baffles the power of Art and the Patient falls a Sacrifice to it, he then brings his Knowledge to the Test, and fixes Honour or discredit on his Reputation by exposing all the Morbid parts to View, and Demonstrates by what means it produced Death, and if perchance he finds something unexpected, which Betrays an Error in Judgement, he like a great and good man immediately acknowledges the mistake, and, for the benefit of survivors, points out other methods by which it might have been more happily treated."[1] The writer of these sensible words fitly became our first professor of clinical medicine,[2] with unobstructed access to the one hundred and thirty patients then in the hospital wards. Subsequently the faculty of the new school was increased and greatly strengthened when Adam Kuhn, trained by Linnaeus, was made professor of materia medica, and Benjamin Rush, already at twenty-four on the threshold of his brilliant career, became professor of chemistry.
Our first medical school was thus soundly conceived as organically part of an institution of learning and intimately connected with a large public hospital. The instruction aimed, as already pointed out, not to supplant, but to supplement apprenticeship. A year's additional training, carrying the bachelor's degree, was offered to students who, having demonstrated a competent knowledge of Latin, mathematics, natural and experimental philosophy, and having served a sufficient apprenticeship to some reputable practitioner in physic, now completed a prescribed lecture curriculum, with attendance upon the practice of the Pennsylvania Hospital for one
- ↑ An essay on The Utility of Clinical Lectures, by Thomas Bond, 1766.
- ↑ There is no record of Dr. Bond's appointment, but in the minutes of the Hospital trustees he "is requested by the Trustees and Professors to continue his Clinical Lectures at the Hospital as a Branch of Medical Education. Quoted by Packard: History of Medicine in the United States, p. 201.
