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MEDICAL EDUCATION


Attendance: 204.
Teaching staff: 25, of whom 8 are professors. No one devotes full time to medical instruction.
Resources available for maintenance: The school receives from the state an annual appropriation of $5000, in return for which, however, sixty-seven free scholarships are given, one to each county; the school is therefore in effect wholly dependent on tuition fees, amounting to $17,300, for its support, most of which is paid out in salaries.
Laboratory facilities: The laboratory equipment is practically limited to inorganic chemistry, elementary bacteriology and pathology, and anatomy, taught by dissecting first the goat, then the human cadaver. The school occupies a well kept old-fashioned building, recently remodeled. It possesses a few old books, but no funds with which to add to them; and a small museum, mostly composed of antiquated wax or papier-maché models.
Clinical facilities: For clinical instruction the school has access to the Sisters' Hospital, 100 beds, the faculty being the staff in term time. The senior students make blood and urine examinations in connection with clinical cases.

Connected with the college building is a new, well arranged dispensary, for the conduct of which an appropriation of $50 a month is available.

Date of visit: January, 1909.

General Considerations

The foregoing account makes it clear that really satisfactory medical education is not now to be had in Alabama. The entrance standards are low; the schools are inadequately equipped; and they are without proper financial resources. To get together their present numbers, standards must be kept low; in consequence, the medical schools do nothing to promote or to share the secondary school development of the state. To that and to any higher movement they are likely to be obstacles. Neither Alabama nor the rest of the south actually needs either school at this time; but as the state has become a patron of medical education, it will hardly retire from the field. Under these circumstances, its policy should aim to bring about a genuine and effective connection between the medical department and the rest of the state university. The task of elevating entrance standards in the medical department and of furnishing a higher quality of scientific training would probably be assisted for the time being by removing the instruction in the first and second years to the university itself at Tuscaloosa; for in no other way can whole-time instructors be now procured. An improvement in the quality of training furnished in the scientific branches will ultimately compel a higher quality of clinical instruction. It is difficult to see how the influence or control of the university can in any event be made effective in Mobile, 232 miles distant, at the opposite end of the state, and in a hospital in whose clinical

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