Orchids Without Coal

U.S. medical schools last year turned out a record-breaking 5,800 graduates. The effort almost knocked them flat on their backs. Last week many of the schools, admitting that they were in serious financial distress, issued an urgent S.O.S. The presidents of 19 universities embracing the nation's top medical schools* solemnly declared: "We warn our fellow citizens that without their prompt and generous aid, our medical schools . . . cannot be expected to safeguard the future health of American citizens and their children."

Many schools have dropped teachers, cut salaries and medical services, overworking their staffs. Three or four, with costs rising and incomes shrinking, have come "perilously near to closing." Of the 70 U.S. medical schools, 43 are supported solely (and the rest partly) by private funds and student fees. Endowment income has dropped sharply, because of falling interest rates, and so have gifts. Though medical students pay the highest professional tuition fees in the nation, their fees do not approach the cost of their education--about $1,200 a year for each student. Foundations, from which medical schools used to get much of their support, now supply less than $4,000,000 a year for all purposes, including research (the schools cost some $25,000,000 to run). Said the college presidents: medical schools need at least a 50% increase in their annual income to continue to turn out the doctors the U.S. needs.

The medical schools' plea was backed up last week by the keeper of one of the chief U.S. medical moneybags--Raymond B. Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. In his annual report, Fosdick observed that medicine's philanthropists have been giving too much of their money for "magic-wand" research, too little for training physicians. Said he: "We cannot grow orchids in a greenhouse that lacks coal."

*Including Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, Michigan, California, Minnesota.

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