Annual Congress

In Chicago, there assembled the annual congress on Medical Education, Medical Licensure, Public Health and Hospitals.

Educational Needs. Dr. Nathan P. Colwell, Secretary of the Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the American Medical Association, defined the present needs of medical education in the U. S. as: 1) more care in selecting or retaining as teachers those who possess adequate training in pedagogy and in the subjects which they propose to teach;

2) proper correlation between teaching in the laboratory and in the clinic;

3) the development of a cirriculum which shall have as its primary object the training of general practitioners with suitable graduate courses for those desiring to specialize.

Dr. Colwell indicated that the 70 class A medical schools in the U. S. today have a total capacity for 17,955 students, although their total enrollment is only 16,736. This answers the contention that students are being turned away because of lack of room. It is certain that the 592 students in Class B schools and the 480 students in class P:schools have not been forced into low grade institutions through lack of space in high grade schools. It was further pointed out that there is no dearth of students, that the number enrolled has increased during the last five years at the rate of 1,000 annually.

Progress Abroad. Mr. Abraham Flexner*; of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching contrasted conditions existing today with what they were 15 years ago when he made his first study of medical schools. During the past two years Mr. Flexner has been conducting a survey of medical education throughout the world. German and Austrian universities, he found "suffering economically." "France has been quite stationary," except insofar as the acquisition of the University of Strasbourg gives the country, for the first time, a modern medical school plant. In Great Britain appear signs of a new vitality in medical teaching; full time teachers have been established in London and Edinburgh schools; research is being conducted in a well organized manner under a Medical Research Council.

American Schools. Mr. Flexner points out that conditions in American schools are not yet ideal. There still exists a wide diversity between our best and our worst schools. "On the face of the papers, a four year high school education followed by two years of college work is required for entrance to a medical school. This looks like uniformity. As a matter of fact, the high school situation in America is utterly chaotic and the college situation hardly less so. No definite meaning whatsoever can be attached to graduation from a four year high school, or to the completion of two years of college work. It means one thing to be a graduate of the Boston Latin School and an entirely different thing to be the graduate of a four year rural high school in any section of the country. What two years of college work mean, I defy anybody to say. They may mean two years of hard work under favorable conditions; they may mean two years of spoon-feeding by college instructors; they may mean two years of skillful cramming by the successors of the late Widow Nolen./- Contrast this chaos with the definite standard of intellectual attainment indicated by the certificate of graduation from a German gymnasium, a French lycee, or the honors course of an English secondary school."

Mr. Flexner ended his address with a plea for broader training of the teaching personnel, including particularly contact with foreign workers. "Science is international; it advances in the most unexpected fashion, now here, now there. And stimulus does not communicate itself best through the printed page. Men must know each other and work with each other. Mere Cook's touring through scientific laboratories abroad does not suffice. We must return to the old way of spending a couple of years in Europe, just as Europeans are getting in the way of spending a year or two with us."

*Abraham Flexner, educator and author (The American College, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, Medical Education in Europe, Prostitution in Europe, A Modern School), born in Louisville 1866, educated at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the University of Berlin, is not to be confused with his brother Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Foundation.

/-Widow Nolen was for many years famed as a Harvard tutor. His offices in the Little Building, Harvard Square, were kept busy the year 'round. The Widow was indeed a subject for controversy; praised by some as "Harvard's most popular professor," he was damned by others as a "crammer."