ordinary laboratory for elementary chemistry, another—poor and very disorderly, without animals—for bacteriology; the room given to histology and pathology is clean, contains a small amount of well kept material, and is adequate to routine elementary work. Anatomy is very poor; there is not even a complete skeleton. No other teaching adjuncts are at hand. No provision is made for even demonstrative work in experimental physiology.
Clinical facilities: These are utterly wretched. The school gives amphitheater clinics only, at a Catholic hospital across the street, practically all of whose work is in surgery. Acute medical cases are seen, if at all, twice a week at the County Hospital, five miles off. A neat dispensary, with poor records and with no laboratory or other equipment, adjoins the school building.
Date of visit: February, 1910.
General Considerations
Wisconsin presents a simple problem: the two Milwaukee schools are without a redeeming feature. It is claimed that the examiner representing the state board enforces a four-year high school standard; but it has been impossible to procure any information at all from this official, though repeated efforts have been made to do so. Neither of the schools meets the most lenient standards in respect to laboratory outfit or teaching; and as for clinical facilities they are hardly more than nominal.
A western state so admirably organized on the educational side, furnishing excellent college opportunities without cost to the student, is surely in position to meet Minnesota and Indiana in the matter of practice standards. The requirement of a year or two of college work as preliminary to practice would quickly leave the medical department of the state university in sole control.
This department has wisely resisted efforts to make of it a divided instead of a half school; nothing worse could ever happen to it than that it should be rounded off with a clinical end at Milwaukee,—made up, perhaps, in part out of the two schools now there. When the time comes for the completion of the department, it must be completed at Madison. The difficulties due to the size and residential character of the town are not insuperable. There is not the least doubt that wise administration can develop on the site of the university a medical school large enough to train the doctors of the state. But its scope will run far beyond this primary duty; for it will inevitably be a producing department. Assuredly, Wisconsin, fortunate beyond almost all other states in the concentration of its higher institutions of learning, will not be guilty of the folly of detaching in whole or part the medical department from the university whose ideals it can share and help to create.
