Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/376

 330 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO great Quarter attracting teachers from every direction. Before the end of the twelfth year after the union of its various parts into a single institution its various faculties numbered more than a hundred instructors and fifty employees of various kinds, and it enrolled annually more than twenty- two hundred students. Its budget of expenditures had naturally increased with its growth. The time came when the annual deficit became so large that it was necessary to call on Mr. Rockefeller to provide for it. Having approved the establishment of this great department in advance, he cheerfully assumed and carried the deficit until, and indeed, after, his great endowment gift of 1910. The budget grew from one hundred and seven thousand dollars in 1901-2 to more than two hundred and fifty thousand in 1915-16. So great a step in expansion and advance was the establishment of the School of Education. The next step was the organizing of the Medical work. It was taken so soon after the preceding one as to be almost coincident with it. Barely a month separated the two. Perhaps nothing was nearer President Harper's heart than the desire to develop a medical school in connection with the University. In many of his Convo- cation statements he urged the establishment of a great School of Medicine for instruction and research. He was never more urgent than when speaking on this subject. A single quotation only is made. It is taken from the eighteenth Convocation statement, April i, 1897: What is the greatest single piece of work which still remains to be done for the cause of education in the city of Chicago and in connection with the University? .... A School of Medicine in the city of Chicago, with an endowment large enough to make it independent of the fees received from its students, with an endowment large enough to provide instruction of as high an order as any that may be found in European cities, with an endowment large enough to provide the facilities of investigation and research which may be used by those who would devote their time to the study of methods of pre- vention of disease as well as of the cure of disease; an endowment for medi- cine which would make it unnecessary for men to seek lands beyond the sea for the sake of doing work which ought to be done here at home; such an endow- ment, I assert, for medical education, is the greatest piece of work which still remains to be done for the cause of education in the city of Chicago. It is impossible to conceive the far-reaching results of such an act. Our children