Entrance Requirement: A four-year high school education or its equivalent. Credentials are passed on by the dean.
Attendance: 85.
Teaching staff: 45, of whom 25 are professors, 20 of other grade.
Resources available for maintenance: The school is supported out of the total university income of $200,000 per annum. Its fee income is $4043; its budget, $28,000.
Laboratory facilities: The school is in general satisfactorily equipped to do undergraduate teaching in the medical sciences. Full-time men are in charge of pathology, bacteriology, and physiology, though the departments lack trained assistants. Histology and embryology are taught in the department of biology. The chair of anatomy is occupied by a non-resident surgeon. There is a good library, with a subscription list including the best German and English journals. A regular fund is available for the purchase of books and apparatus.
Clinical facilities: The university hospital is entirely inadequate, even though the school is small. It contains $5 beds and averages 16 patients availabe for teaching. Its management has only recently been modernized. It now contains a clinical laboratory where students work, keeping excellent records of their findings. There are from 12 to 15 obstetrical cases annually in the hospital; these are supplemented by an out-patient service.
The dispensary is slight.
Date of visit: April, 1909.
General Considerations
The state is overcrowded with doctors. It can therefore safely go to a higher standard; indeed, the new law provides that after 1912, all applicants for license must have had, previous to their medical education, a year of college work. As this is a practice, and not an educational, requirement, the Denver school may still continue to train low-grade men for adjacent states;[1] but it is probable that if it continues on a standard below the legal practice minimum, it will be too discredited, and if it arises to the aforesaid minimum, too much reduced, to continue. The state university alone, so far as we can now see, can hope to obtain the financial backing necessary to teach medicine in the proper way regardless of income from fees, and to it a monopoly should quickly fall. Its laboratory facilities are steadily increasing, but adequate clinical resources are not at present assured. It is important, therefore, that as a first step the state university gain access to the clinical facilities at Denver, from which it is now cut off, first, by a constitutional provision forbidding the state university to teach except at Boulder, second, by the fact that the City Hospital is
- ↑ It is, however, equally in the interest of these states that a further low-grade supply should be cut off. Though none of the following states has a medical school, all have too many doctors. The ratios are: Wyoming, 1:541; Arizona, 1:627; Idaho, 1:663; New Mexico, 1:618.
