Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/264

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246
MEDICAL EDUCATION

divided between medicine and surgery; elsewhere surgery greatly predominates. Obstetrical work is mainly furnished by the Woman's Hospital and by an outpatient department just started. Post-mortems are hard to get.

The dispensary service is fair.

Date of visit: December, 1909.


(5) Detroit Homeopathic College. Organized 1899. An independent school.
Entrance requirement: A four-year high school course or its equivalent.
Attendance: 34.
Teaching staff: 35, of whom 17 are professors, 18 of other grade.
Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $3010 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: These are wretched. There is an ordinary laboratory for chemistry; another, much less than ordinary, for bacteriology. The pathological room contained a few dozen specimens in utter disorder; the anatomical room contained a single cadaver. The teaching-rooms are bare, except for chairs and tables; the building is poorly kept. The dean and the secretary have their offices "downtown."
Clinical facilities: The school has access to Grace Hospital the wards of which contain 56 beds, mostly surgical. Clinics are held two days weekly. The hospital authorities are well disposed towards the school, but the "boys don't take advantage of their opportunities."

There is a dispensary at the school building. It is incredibly bad. Prescriptions are found written on scraps of paper, unnumbered. There are no systematic records.

Date of visit: December, 1909.


General Considerations

Michigan is fortunate in the possession of an alert state board, which enforces with vigor the high school requirement, and may perhaps be counted on to advocate an advance of the state practice standard to meet the educational standard of the state university. As the state furnishes a thoroughly admirable education at relatively slight expense, there is no reason why it should keep the practice of medicine open to low-grade physicians, whether trained within or without its borders. Sound policy would quickly close the two homeopathic schools and, in all probability, the Detroit College of Medicine. To the credit of the latter institution, however, be it said that its officers have heartily coöperated with the state board in the enforcement of a genuine high school standard.

The real problem now agitating the state concerns the medical department of the state university at Ann Arbor. The defects of Ann Arbor as the seat of a medical school have been touched on in these pages. There is no question that, if the entire state university were at Detroit, the medical department would be better off. But