Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/379

 FURTHER EXPANSION 333 thousand dollars, and that the attendance of students would be increased by three hundred, fully providing through their fees for the increase in expenses. It will be seen from these estimates how great a step in expansion was taken in assuming the instruction of the classes of the first two years of the medical course. The new work began October i, 1901, and was carried on successfully. The number of students was not large at the outset. It was five years before it reached three hundred, and it averaged about that number during the following eight years. When one remembers the uninterrupted growth of the University, he wonders why the attendance in the medical department did not show the same increase. It should be said in explanation that through a series of years the standard for admission was raised annually, every suc- cessive step in the process cutting off an additional number of candidates for entrance. The expenditures of the first year in the new department, in addition to the fifty thousand dollars for the initial equipment, amounted to forty-one thousand dollars, but soon increased to above fifty thousand dollars a year. This was the limit of expan- sion in medicine during the first quarter-century. In President Harper's Decennial Report, 1901-2, he made a somewhat full statement of the order of procedure he hoped to see followed in the development of the medical work. It included the erection of new buildings, the establishment of new chairs, the provision of great hospitals for Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, Children's Diseases, and Contagious Diseases, the organization of a School of Dentistry and a Nurses' Training School, and the extension of the work of the Medical School to the three sides of the city. At the end of the first quarter-century the great givers who would enable the Uni- versity to take these advanced steps were still hoped for and expected. The steps in expansion in this second period, as in the first, crowded one upon the other. The Medical Courses had hardly been begun before the final steps were being taken for the estab- lishment of the Law School. Of course that School had been a part of the President's original plan. When he had waited for it ten years he felt that he had waited a very long time indeed.