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Clinical facilities: A total of eleven hours a week of clinical instruction, only nine of which can be attended by any one student, is offered at four different hospitals. The opportunities, limited as they are, are largely surgical. The feeling towards the school is unusually cordial, but the hospitals lack the necessary equipment and organization for effective teaching.}}
At the time the school was visited a small room was used for a dispensary; the attendance was slight; there was no equipment at all. Recently larger quarters have been provided.
Date of visit: November, 1909.
General Considerations
Recent action making a year of college work the minimum preliminary to practise in Kansas will wipe out the eclectic school at Kansas City and the Topeka school, both of which would, however, die out even on the present standard. The future of medical education in the state, therefore, very properly lies with the state university. This institution has shown the desire to provide instruction of high grade by raising its entrance requirements until they now call for two years of college work; but it did not realize that it was incumbent upon it to improve facilities and instruction at the same time. Great efforts must therefore be made to hasten their development, for the higher entrance requirement is already in force. The school is now a divided school. It would be a simple matter to develop the laboratory end at Lawrence; it will be difficult and expensive to develop the clinical end at Rosedale correspondingly; and still more difficult, to establish effective coöperation between the severed halves of the department. The needs of a university medical department are so great that the university will find it necessary to refrain from many other projects, pending the upbuilding of a creditable school of medicine. It is therefore unfortunate that the educational funds of the state have been already to some extent needlessly consumed in the duplication of engineering and normal departments within the several state institutions. No comprehensive and well coördinated scheme of state educational development has been worked out. It would seem essential in the first place to demarcate the respective provinces of the several state institutions, so that each would care for certain interests without trespassing on the ground reserved to the others. That done, medicine would fall to the state university and would include a public health laboratory. Certain fundamental questions respecting the location, organization, and general scope of the entire department would next require to be settled. Thereafter, the plan adopted could be realized unit by unit, year by year.