time to medical education. At Halifax, the fee income is some $5000 a year and the government makes an appropriation of $1200,-a total of $6200. The faculty apportions this sum as follows: three-fourths of the fees are divided among the teachers; one-fourth of the fees plus the government subsidy must carry all other expense,—heat, light, janitor service, laboratory maintenance: the disgraceful condition of the premises follows as a matter of course. The Hahnemann of Philadelphia, with estimated receipts of $18,500, distributes $11,000 among teaching practitioners and spends perhaps $1500 on equipment and $500 for laboratory material. Advertising and commencement exercises—the latter only another form of advertising—often cost these institutions more than their laboratories. One large eastern institution expends $4700 on publicity, as against $3500 on its laboratories; another—a New York school, this—$1500 on publicity, $1100 on laboratories; another, $2100 on advertising, $1160 on laboratories; another—this time in the south—$1000 on advertising, $500 on laboratories, "including repairs."[1]
The conclusion, then, is irresistible that these schools, far from being the benevolent enterprises that they are alleged to be, still "pay," both directly and indirectly; nor can a genuine altruistic motive be made out for any medical school which does not consistently devote its entire income to providing decent facilities and adequate instruction in the laboratories, where the teachers, if competent, must rely wholly on their salaries. Clinical teachers ought undoubtedly be paid, but not out of fees at the expense of laboratories and laboratory men. Institutions that supplement their fee income out of special endowments or out of their general funds very properly go ahead to pay their clinical teachers; otherwise the practitioner teacher must be subordinated. That these schools have been persistently used for pecuniary advantage is clear when an inventory of their belongings is contrasted with the annual income that has in some cases been earned for many years. They have little or nothing to show in the way of equipment. The medical department of the University of Arkansas is thirty years old; its annual receipts are now $14,100;[2] except for a small recent a investment, it is practically bare. The medical department of Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) has been in operation almost sixty years; its annual income is now estimated at $11,000. Its plant can represent only a small fraction of its receipts during its lifetime. The Medical College of Georgia is seventy years old; it has accumulated no plant worthy the name. The medical department of the University of Oregon, started in 1887, with a present fee income of $8000 and state aid of $1000 a year, has only one small laboratory that represents any investment at all. The medical department of the University of Chattanooga—twenty-one years old—with an income now of $4290, of which the dean draws $1800, would not, if sold under
- ↑ Additional examples to prove that the schools are operated for the profit of their faculties may be given if necessary: University of Alabama, te income $19,788, salaries $14,000; University of Vermont, fee income, $22,730, salaries and dividends, $17,489 (laboratories, supplies, etc., $191, publicity, $1289).
- ↑ Estimated.
