has an attendance of eight or ten a day: there are no case records, not even a prescription file, no clinical laboratory, and not so much as a microscope on the premises. The University of Alabama (Mobile) is the only small southern school with decent dispensary quarters: an attractive wing has been recently built for the purpose by the state.
There remains still the goodly number of schools that possess absolutely no dispensary provision at all. With some of them we are already familiar as destitute of hospital facilities. Without dispensary teaching of any kind, their students enter the homes of the poor,— to officiate at childbirth, to care for wage-workers on whose wellbeing depends the independence of the family. Meridian, the Georgia Eclectic, Willamette, the Lincoln Eclectic, the Hospital Medical College (Atlanta), the American Medical College[1] (St. Louis), the Chattanooga Medical College, Western University (London, Ontario), are representative schools of this description. It is painful to include in essentially the same class the Medical College of the State of South Carolina, at Charleston, which in lieu of a school dispensary refers to the out-patient work of the Roper Hospital, with which its students have nothing at all to do. The two Dallas schools—both long without a dispensary—are now starting one; Ensworth Medical College at St. Joseph, Missouri,—a city of 130,000,- has practically no dispensary at all; Epworth University (Oklahoma City) is in the same plight. Not a few of these institutions might develop a fair dispensary service if their opportunities were intelligently cultivated. For example, the University of Buffalo, in a city of 400,000, has a wretched dispensary with a daily attendance of from twelve to fifteen, if one can judge by sampling; for tabulated records there are none. Such notes as exist are brief and irregular. The poor do better to suffer in silence rather than to trust to the haphazard student medication that such institutions now supply.
Astonishing to relate, the conditions that have been portrayed are defended. It is alleged in extenuation that "our graduates pass state board examinations, get hospital appointments, succeed in practice." It is quite true: what of it? The argument if valid would commit every school above the lowest to deliberate deterioration of its facilities. Bowdoin makes light of a wretched dispensary on the grounds above cited; Dartmouth men succeed by the same tests without any dispensary at all; ergo, Bowdoin may safely forego dispensary teaching altogether. Is it not obvious that both are mistaken? that they take hold of the situation at the wrong end? Medical education is nowadays a definite problem, the factors to which, the end of which, may be specifically stated. We know exactly what it drives at; we can determine to a nicety the means necessary to reach the goal thus set up. It will shortly be demonstrated that the number of doctors needed can in most sections be supplied without material departure from the conditions agreed on. Why, then, should they be abandoned? In order that local doctors may continue to develop their professional
- ↑ At this school one is naïvely told that they have "a dispensary room. and almost every day some one comes."
