Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/106

88 Elsewhere, dissecting-rooms are indeed found, but the conditions in them defy description. The smell is intolerable; the cadavers now putrid, as at Temple University (Philadelphia), the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy, the Halifax Medical School, and in many of the southern schools, including Vanderbilt; again, dry as tanned leather,—at the University of Tennessee, Bennett (Chicago), Denver and Gross (Denver), Creighton (Omaha), College of Physicians and Surgeons, St. Louis, for example. At the Barnes Medical College (St. Louis) the first-year students listen to lectures only in the last "semestry;" they are not permitted to dissect because first-year men only "hack and butcher." The dissecting-room of the Kansas Medical College, Topeka (the medical department of Washburn College), did duty incidentally as a chicken yard: corn was scattered over the floor-along with other things—and poultry fed placidly in the long intervals before instruction in anatomy began.

A few of these schools have the apparatus requisite to teach pathology and bacteriology in routine fashion: the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons, for one. But in general they own an inadequate and at times decreasing supply of microscopes—for everywhere one hears theft assigned in extenuation of a short supply or defective instruments. Post-mortems are practically nil. None are claimed at Chattanooga, Atlanta, Charlotte (North Carolina), or Dallas (Baylor and Southwestern Universities); two in six years were remembered at the medical department of the University of Georgia (Augusta). In default of post-mortems, material is sometimes obtained from the surgeons; but not all the schools can even then prepare it properly. To cut matters short, hardened material and sometimes sections are bought "in the east." The student at most stains and mounts them. Too frequently he does no more than look at them through the microscope. Whether he sees anything, remains a problem; for he rarely makes a drawing. In many cases it is impossible to believe that even this is done. At the College of Physicians and Surgeons, St. Louis, individual lockers are provided; on examination they prove to be empty. An explanation is offered: "the boys bring slides and cover-glasses along; they furnish their own and keep them at home."

It is, of course, not to be supposed that these schools would be materially better even if well equipped and decently cared for. It makes very little difference to the student body that they assemble whether microscopes and incubators are provided or not. The poor fellow who in an unguarded moment is caught by advertisements, premiums, or canvassing agents cannot be taught modern medicine, no matter what investments in apparatus the state boards force. Meanwhile the sole beneficiaries of the traffic are the teachers—as a rule, the small group that constitutes the "faculty;" in some instances, however, only the dean, who "owns" or "runs" the school. His associates profit indirectly by what is technically known as the "reflex." Their