BUFFALO: Population, 401,441.
(3) University of Buffalo Medical Department. Organized 1846. Despite the univerity charter, the University of Buffalo is a fiction. Schools of medicine, law, dentistry, and pharmacy are aggregated under the designation; but they are to all intents and purposes independent schools, each living on its own fees.
Entrace requirement: Admission is on the basis of the Regents' Medical Student Certificate, being the equivalent of a high school education.
Attendance: 193.
Teaching staff: 97, of whom 38 are professors.
Resources available for maintenance: Fees amounting to $31,984.
Laboratory facilities: The school has a conventionally adequate equipment for anatomy, ordinary laboratories for chemistry, bacteriology, and pathology, a meager outfit in physiology,—it having been found that the students cannot profitably do much experimental work themselves,—nothing for pharmacology. The "wholetime" teachers have in the main other duties besides teaching in medicine: the professor of pathology and bacteriology is registrar, the chemist officiates in the pharmacy department, the anatomist in the dental department. There is a small museum, but a good library of 8000 volumes, current German and English periodicals, with a librarian in charge.
Clinical facilities: For clinical teaching, the school relies mainly on the Buffalo General Hospital close by. It has access to some 200 beds, used for demonstrative teaching in the wards. Records are made by internes. Students do no clinical laboratory work in connection with special patients, the teaching in clinical microscopy being separately given at the college. Infectious diseases are didactically taught. Clinical obstetrics is imperfectly organized. Besides the Buffalo General Hospital, a weekly clinic is held at the County Hospital, four miles distant, four clinics at the Sisters' Hospital, one and a half miles away, etc.
Despite the size of the city, the college dispensary is wretched. It has an attendance of perhaps 3000 during the college year, skin, eye, and ear cases mainly. A definite statement is impossible because there are no systematic records. The rooms are ill equipped. Records consist of brief pencil notes in separate books, usually without index. The work is hastily and superficially done, and its influence on the students, so far as it goes, must be thoroughly bad. The catalogue states, however, that as attendance in the dispensary is obligatory, each student "will secure an unusually thorough training in the taking and recording of histories."
Date of visit: October, 1909.
