Clinical facilities: Being not yet needed, these are not yet arranged for.
Date of visit: April, 1909.
KANSAS CITY:
(13) Postgraduate Hospital School. This institution has a hospital of 25 ward beds, containing 15 patients,—2 medical, 15 surgical. There were no students in attendance at the date of the visit. The institution is really a private hospital, but incorporation as a school gives its faculty privileges at the City Hospital.
General Considerations
Medical education in Missouri is at a low ebb. The state board lacks authority to enforce even a high school preliminary,— the more regrettable as, under the stimulating influence of the state university, an excellent. high school system has been developed. Missouri is therefore in the attitude of requiring every boy and girl who wishes to attend the state university to spend four years in good secondary schools supported by the people, but men and women who are charged to safeguard public health may attend medical schools chartered by the state without the assurance of any definite training whatever.[1] In consequence, the state is badly overcrowded with practitioners trained in poor schools, and still maintains some of the poorest schools in the country. Utterly wretched are (1) Kansas City Hahnemann Medical College, (2) Central College of Osteopathy, (3) American School of Osteopathy (Kirksville), (4) St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons, (5) American Medical College, (6) Hippocratean College of Medicine; feeble and without promise are (7) Barnes Medical College, (8) Ensworth Medical College, and (9) University Medical College, though the last named is distinctly superior to the other eight. There remain the two-year school conducted by the state university, the medical department of Washington University, and the St. Louis University School of Medicine.
There are in the state of Missouri fifty-odd academic institutions, of which only two have resources adequate to support medical schools, viz., the state university and Washington University. Of the several towns in the state capable of supplying clinical material, only one—St. Louis—contains a strong resident university. Washington University, St. Louis, is therefore at this writing marked out as the natural patron of medical education in Missouri.
Its importance is bound to be more than local. Aside fim its obvious possibilities as a productive scientific center, Washington University must be the min factor in the t!ining of physicians for the southwest country; the city of St. Louis has in this section an even clearer oppolunity than has Chicago in the middle west, New York in the east, or Boston in New England. For there is no other large city
- ↑ That is what a certificate from a county school commissioner amounts to, no matter what it protends to certify.
