homeopathy belongs of right to scientific medicine and is at this moment incorporate in it; nothing else has any footing at all, whether it be of allopathic or homeopathic lineage. "A new school of practitioners has arisen," says Dr. Osier, "which cares nothing for homeopathy and less for so-called allopathy. It seeks to study, rationally and scientifically, the action of drugs, old and new."[1]
There are eight eclectic schools.[2] One of them—that in New York City—requires the Regents' Medical Student Certificate, i. e., a four-year high school education, for admission; the Cincinnati school must require an equal preliminary education of students expecting to practise in Ohio, others taking the matter into their own hands. Just how the instruction is thus accommodated to various levels is not clear. The remaining six schools have either nominal requirements or none at all.
None of the schools has anything remotely resembling the laboratory equipment which all claim in their catalogues. The Cincinnati institution possesses a new and attractive building, thus far meagerly fitted out; the New York school has a clean building with a chemical laboratory in which elementary chemistry can be and apparently is taught properly. It has little else: a small room for the microscopic subjects, but no adequate equipment for teaching them; a few thousand books, mostly old; a few models, a lantern, etc.,—and this is most satisfactorily equipped of all the eclectic institutions. The Hospital School at Atlanta, starting on four weeks' notice, had time to get students, but not to get means of teaching them. The private laboratory of the instructor in pathology and bacteriology was meanwhile at their service: other equipment there was, at the time of the visit, none.
The remaining five eclectic schools are without exception filthy and almost bare. They have at best grimy little laboratories for elementary chemistry, a few microscopes, some bottles containing discolored and unlabeled pathological material, an incubator out of commission, and a horrid dissecting-room,—when dissecting is in progress. The St. Louis school was the proud possessor of some new physiological apparatus, the state board having recently issued an edict requiring its purchase; but there was no place to use it and no sign of its use. The Kansas City institution had likewise made a recent investment to the same extent, having just taken on the faculty the "laboratory man" of the local homeopathic and osteopathic schools. The other Atlanta, the Los Angeles, and the Lincoln schools have even less. The Lincoln institution alleges that its scientific training is given at Cotner University, where the only material available for medical instruction consists of a chemical laboratory, some microscopes, and a small collection of stuffed birds.
Of the eight schools under discussion, none has decent clinical opportunities. The New York school can send three students twice weekly to the Sydenham Hospital; the Cincinnati school is affiliated with the Seton Hospital, with 24 available beds,