dissection comes in the latter half of the course, being completed just one-half year before graduation. The supply of material is also scant: the school had had one cadaver early in the fall and was looking ahead to a second the latter part of the winter. The Los Angeles college has a small room with five tables for a student body numbering 250; it solves the difficulty by giving separate squads two hours a week each. At Philadelphia the department of anatomy occupies an outhouse, whence the noisome odor of decaying cadavers permeates the premises. Other subjects fare even worse. A small chemical laboratory is occasionally seen,—at Philadelphia it happens to be in a dark cellar. At Kirksville a fair-sized room is devoted to pathology and bacteriology; the huge classes are divided into bands of 32, each of which gets a six weeks' course, following the directions of a rigid syllabus under a teacher who is himself a student. At Cambridge pathology comes in the last year. A professor in the Kansas City school said of his own institution that it had practically no laboratories at all; the Still College at Des Moines has, in place of laboratories, laboratory signs; the Littlejohn at Chicago, whose catalogue avers that the "physician should be imbued with a knowledge of the healing art in its widest fields, and here is the opportunity,"[1] has lately in rebuilding wrecked all its laboratories but that of chemistry without in the least interfering with its usual pedagogic routine."[2]
Nowhere is there the faintest effort to connect the "laboratory teaching" with "clinical osteopathy;" perhaps because no school has anything approaching the requisite clinical opportunities. Once more, their tenets are not in question. Much difference of opinion prevails among them as to whether they should teach everything or only some things; as to whether they may use drugs in certain conditions or must confine themselves wholly to manipulation for "osteopathic lesions." However this may be, the osteopath cannot learn his technique and when it is applicable, except through experience with ailing individuals. And these, for the most part, he begins to see only when his prosperity begins after receiving his "D.O." degree. The Kirksville school (560 students) has indeed a hospital of 54 beds, of which, however, only 20 are in the wards, and practically all are surgical. Eight obstetrical cases were obtained in April and May of last year. The Des Moines and Kansas City schools have no hospitals at all; the students see no acute cases "unless the doctors can take them along." The Pacific College has a hospital of from twelve to fifteen surgical and obstetrical beds, all pay; "the students have no regular work at the hospital as there are so few acute cases; they don't see as much acute work as they should, but they treat everything." The Littlejohn (Chicago) has also a pay hospital, of 20 beds, mostly surgical. The Philadelphia school, whose "opportunities for practical work" are highly extolled in its catalogue, has an infirmary with three beds, occupied by
