schools can be met without considerable resort to either the divided or the remote department.[1]
The divided school begins by inheriting a serious problem. Its laboratory end, situated at the university, has been recently constituted of modern men; the clinical end, situated in a city at some distance, is usually what is left of the old-fashioned school which the university adopted in taking on its medical department.[2] In such cases, there are practically two schools with a formal connection; such is essentially the situation in California, Kansas, and Nebraska. In course of time these clinical faculties will be reconstituted of men of more modern stamp. But the separation of the clinical branch, with the increasing absorption of the teachers in practice, involves constant danger of fresh alienation. The clinical professor of the university is very apt to be a busy physician; and if so, pedagogical and scientific ideals are all the more easily crowded into a narrow corner, when he does not breathe the bracing atmosphere of adjacent laboratories. In time, a more exacting pedagogical code and increased sensitiveness to real scientific distinction may to some extent correct the tendency. Meanwhile, these institutions, so long as they continue, require much more vigorous administrative supervision than they have anywhere received. A dean, moving freely between the two branches, and frequent opportunities for social and scientific intercourse between scientific and clinical faculties, may throw a more or less unsteady bridge across the gap. But there is little reason to believe that the divided school will ever function as an organic whole, though it may be tolerable as a halfway stage on the road from the proprietary school to the complete university department. "I cannot help wondering," said President Pritchett,[3] "how it would affect the pedagogic and professional ideals of an engineering school if its first two years were given in one place and the last two years in a place two hundred miles away. My impression is that there would be two separate schools with very little more reaction, the one upon the other, than exists between any other two schools so located." Thus far the difficulty seems hardly to have been suspected: the dean of Nebraska at Lincoln is a busy professor who has no real hold on the clinical men at Omaha; the dean of California is superintendent of the hospital in San Francisco, with no real control of what goes on at Berkeley, and surely without any possible control over the second clinical department at Los Angeles; Kansas practically accepts the split by setting up a dean at each of the two ends, though they are only an hour and a half apart; Mississippi, with even better reason, does the same, for the journey from Oxford to Vicksburg, not great when measured in miles, takes the better part of a day even if one is lucky enough to make the necessary railroad connections.
The problem of the half-school is different. The two-year school originated in
- ↑ See chapter ix.
- ↑ In a measure, also still true of some of the complete schools; but the constant contact of laboratory and clinical men tends gradually to bring the edges together.
- ↑ Address: "The Obligations of the University to Medical Education," before Council on Education, American Medical Association, Feb. 28, 1910 (Journal A. M. A., vol. liv. p. 1109).
