Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/611

Rh of laymen, and instruction in "First Aid to the Injured" is given to policemen, firemen, and enthusiastic young ladies! Very many laymen also interest themselves most liberally in the establishment and management of hospitals and dispensaries.

All these activities, directed toward improving the public health and alleviating sickness and suffering, are most gratifying and commendable, and call for increasing thoroughness in methods of educating physicians, for, without the co-operation of the public with scientific men who devote their lives to the study of these subjects, much benevolent energy as well as time and expense are wasted or misapplied. Is it not clearly of vital moment that the public for its own protection should see to it, by legislation or other means, that the medical schools of this country are of the highest order? A dozen well-trained and properly qualified physicians will be of vastly more benefit anywhere than a hundred "M. D.'s" who have slipped through some of our so-called medical "colleges" in the easy manner that is still quite possible. It is disgraceful, and yet it happens constantly, that men are graduated by prominent medical schools or colleges in this country without ever having listened to an abnormal heart sound, seen a case of measles, or been present at a confinement. "But," it is asked, "why should the general public take any interest in medical education? Why not let doctors manage their own 'shops,' as they always have done, unaided by public support?"

The answer is that, so long as a medical college is dependent entirely upon the fees of its students for support, the highest educational good can not be attained. The question concerns endowment. A review of a few facts and statistics will demonstrate this need.

The medical profession in the United States, like many branches of industry, is at present suffering severely from over-repletion. There are more doctors, in proportion to the population, than in any other country in the world. The laws of supply and demand tend to lead many men toward those schools where they can soonest secure their diplomas with least expenditure of time and money (and too often of energy). The schools become overcrowded, and new ones spring up with alarming rapidity. A century ago, with a population of 3,000,000, there were two medical schools. To-day, with a population of 50,000,000, we have eighty-seven medical schools, distributed through twenty-eight States and the District of Columbia. Of these schools, thirty-nine have been opened within fifteen years, and twenty-one (or about twenty-six per cent) within five years past. With them are associated over 1,300 instructors (many of whom offer their services gratuitously) and over 10,000 students, while about 3,600 new doctors are annually "turned loose upon the community," as the daily press courteously expresses it. Forty-six per cent of the schools offer only a two-years