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MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
498 the Act in this way are asked to inform the union. Some of the cases dealt with during the year included questions of fees, certification, and alleged negligence. The report again impresses on doctors the importance of care in the coupling of anaesthetic cylinders, and the dangers of explosions in the theatre ; and on surgeons the need for capable swab-counting, the importance of X-ray examination of bony injuries, and the duty which lies on them to establish the diagnosis to their own satisfaction : it is not wise to accept a colleague’s opinion and to operate without confirming his findings. One member had found a commercial firm using a quotation from an article of his, published in the medical press, to support their advertisement for a certain form of electrical treatment. Permission to use his name had not been asked. The union protested to the advertisers who withdrew all the remaining pamphlets containing the advertisement and undertook to issue no more of the kind. Other examples of the union’s work could be given, for the annual report makes instructive reading ; but as Mr. Buxton pointed out, the existence of the M.D.IT., telegraphic address " Damocles," should suffice to remind us that the path of the practitioner may be far from easy.
practitioners contravening
THE MAKINGS OF A MEDICAL SCHOOL
IN the hope that his findings might guide them in establishing a university medical school, the governors of the University of British Columbia asked Dr. C. E. Dolman, their professor of bacteriology and preventive
medicine, to make a survey of medical education in Canada and the United States.l Professor Dolman visited the 11 medical schools of Canada, and 22 leading medical schools in the U.S.A., talking with heads of departments, staff members, students, university presidents, deans, representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, hospital directors, and any others who came his way. His list of requirements for a first-class medical school begins with a stable and flourishing parent university, a large body of good applicants from whom students can be selected, enough money, and a picked staff, of whom the heads of departments and some others are to be full-time. Teaching affiliations with local hospitals, he considers, should be made on terms satisfactory to the university ; but there must also be a university hospital staffed entirely by the faculty of medicine. The school should be placed in the campus so that the students share the life and interests of their fellows working in other faculties ; and the medical faculty must share its resources with the university, offering special courses to non-medical graduates, training students for medical ancillary services, and being fully responsible for a well-developed university health service. He found, he says, plenty of evidence that a secondclass university cannot hope to have better than a second-class medical school. Though fees for the medical course are nearly twice as high as for other courses given in the same university, they seldom meet more than a third, or in some schools a sixth, of the cost, and no university should contemplate founding this expensive form of school unless it has proper resources. Too big a teaching load on staff puts an end to the serious and sustained research which must be among the first duties of a medical school. A good staff, once appointed, must have proper apparatus for research, and such equipment quickly goes out of date " hence no medical school ever seems to find its budget adequate." In the United States he found that the annual cost per student ranged from$600 to$3893 ; and he had no doubt that the student in the expensive schools got better teaching. Tutorials and seminars are better vehicles for teaching 1.
Report to the board of governors of the University Columbia, May, 1946.
of British
than didactic lectures, but are possible only when the ratio of instructors to students is high ; and the atmosphere is more favourable to learning in a school where research is an honoured activity, not an intermittent and clandestine indulgence. The best annual entry, Professor Dolman thinks, is round about 50 students a year. The Goodenough report, it will be remembered, suggested an entry of 100, which he would consider too high on the ground that if a class is much over 55 or 60 it has to be split into sections, and a disproportionate number of additional teachers must be provided. Good staff are as scarce in America as here. He notes that in the U.S.A. at least four chairs, and numerous assistant professorships, of anatomy are vacant, and that good pha,rmacologists are even harder to find than anatomists. Medically qualified men who go in for full-time teaching do it at a financial sacrifice, but even so he believes that " without plenty of money one cannot hope to get good men." He is also clear that it is not enough to appoint a single full-time man in a clinical department and leave him dependent for help on part-time workers and volunteers : the result of that is to push the head of the department into " the role of chore-boy." In discussing the medical curriculum, Professor Dolman insists that preventive medicine must be better taught, but not to the point of displacing the doctor’s traditional concern with the care of the sick. He notes the increasing popularity of joint conferences in which the anatomist, bacteriologist, biochemist, and pharmacologist take equal part with the physician and surgeon. In some of the best schools the department of psychiatry arranges lectures, demonstrations, and seminars, on normal psychology and on the psychological bases of abnormal behaviour, for students in their first and second years. The various departments must be closely interrelated, not only in the intellectual but in the physical sense; it is hard to cooperate fully over a gap of, say, six miles. He believes that every link possible should be forged between the medical school and the general practitioner, as well as with State health departments. Perhaps his most telling observation is that " the form and fame of a medical school is very largely determined by the character and ability of its first Dean." MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL THE Committee of Privy Council for Medical Research have appointed Group-Captain C. A. B. Wilcock, M.P., Dr. C. A. Lovatt Evans, F.R.s. (professor of physiology in the University of London), and Dr. R. A. Peters, F.R.S. (professor of biochemistry in the University of Oxford), to be members of the Medical Research Council. RETIREMENT OF MR. F. W. MARTIN
produce this journal have lost a valued colleague by the retirement on Sept. 26 of Mr. Martin, our head printer. He and his father, W. G. Martin, WE who
between them held this office for 56 years, and his father’s association with THE LANCET began over 70 years ago. On July 4, 1893, Frederick William Martin was bound apprentice for seven years to Thomas Henry Wakley, F.R.C.S., and Thomas Wakley, jun., L.R.C.P., then proprietors of THE LANCET, to learn the Art of LetterPress Printing, which they use " and until 1921 he worked at 423, Strand, where the typesetting was done above the editorial office. When 25 years ago the printing was transferred to Messrs. Hazell, Watson, and Viney, in Long Acre, Mr. Martin joined their staff but continued his close association with the editorial and niaiiagerial departments of the journal. Among us he had by far the longest experience of THE LANCET, and he did much to preserve its standards and transmit its tradition. The apprentice became himself a teacher and counsellor, and remains a friend.
,
practitioners contravening
THE MAKINGS OF A MEDICAL SCHOOL
IN the hope that his findings might guide them in establishing a university medical school, the governors of the University of British Columbia asked Dr. C. E. Dolman, their professor of bacteriology and preventive
medicine, to make a survey of medical education in Canada and the United States.l Professor Dolman visited the 11 medical schools of Canada, and 22 leading medical schools in the U.S.A., talking with heads of departments, staff members, students, university presidents, deans, representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, hospital directors, and any others who came his way. His list of requirements for a first-class medical school begins with a stable and flourishing parent university, a large body of good applicants from whom students can be selected, enough money, and a picked staff, of whom the heads of departments and some others are to be full-time. Teaching affiliations with local hospitals, he considers, should be made on terms satisfactory to the university ; but there must also be a university hospital staffed entirely by the faculty of medicine. The school should be placed in the campus so that the students share the life and interests of their fellows working in other faculties ; and the medical faculty must share its resources with the university, offering special courses to non-medical graduates, training students for medical ancillary services, and being fully responsible for a well-developed university health service. He found, he says, plenty of evidence that a secondclass university cannot hope to have better than a second-class medical school. Though fees for the medical course are nearly twice as high as for other courses given in the same university, they seldom meet more than a third, or in some schools a sixth, of the cost, and no university should contemplate founding this expensive form of school unless it has proper resources. Too big a teaching load on staff puts an end to the serious and sustained research which must be among the first duties of a medical school. A good staff, once appointed, must have proper apparatus for research, and such equipment quickly goes out of date " hence no medical school ever seems to find its budget adequate." In the United States he found that the annual cost per student ranged from$600 to$3893 ; and he had no doubt that the student in the expensive schools got better teaching. Tutorials and seminars are better vehicles for teaching 1.
Report to the board of governors of the University Columbia, May, 1946.
of British
than didactic lectures, but are possible only when the ratio of instructors to students is high ; and the atmosphere is more favourable to learning in a school where research is an honoured activity, not an intermittent and clandestine indulgence. The best annual entry, Professor Dolman thinks, is round about 50 students a year. The Goodenough report, it will be remembered, suggested an entry of 100, which he would consider too high on the ground that if a class is much over 55 or 60 it has to be split into sections, and a disproportionate number of additional teachers must be provided. Good staff are as scarce in America as here. He notes that in the U.S.A. at least four chairs, and numerous assistant professorships, of anatomy are vacant, and that good pha,rmacologists are even harder to find than anatomists. Medically qualified men who go in for full-time teaching do it at a financial sacrifice, but even so he believes that " without plenty of money one cannot hope to get good men." He is also clear that it is not enough to appoint a single full-time man in a clinical department and leave him dependent for help on part-time workers and volunteers : the result of that is to push the head of the department into " the role of chore-boy." In discussing the medical curriculum, Professor Dolman insists that preventive medicine must be better taught, but not to the point of displacing the doctor’s traditional concern with the care of the sick. He notes the increasing popularity of joint conferences in which the anatomist, bacteriologist, biochemist, and pharmacologist take equal part with the physician and surgeon. In some of the best schools the department of psychiatry arranges lectures, demonstrations, and seminars, on normal psychology and on the psychological bases of abnormal behaviour, for students in their first and second years. The various departments must be closely interrelated, not only in the intellectual but in the physical sense; it is hard to cooperate fully over a gap of, say, six miles. He believes that every link possible should be forged between the medical school and the general practitioner, as well as with State health departments. Perhaps his most telling observation is that " the form and fame of a medical school is very largely determined by the character and ability of its first Dean." MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL THE Committee of Privy Council for Medical Research have appointed Group-Captain C. A. B. Wilcock, M.P., Dr. C. A. Lovatt Evans, F.R.s. (professor of physiology in the University of London), and Dr. R. A. Peters, F.R.S. (professor of biochemistry in the University of Oxford), to be members of the Medical Research Council. RETIREMENT OF MR. F. W. MARTIN
produce this journal have lost a valued colleague by the retirement on Sept. 26 of Mr. Martin, our head printer. He and his father, W. G. Martin, WE who
between them held this office for 56 years, and his father’s association with THE LANCET began over 70 years ago. On July 4, 1893, Frederick William Martin was bound apprentice for seven years to Thomas Henry Wakley, F.R.C.S., and Thomas Wakley, jun., L.R.C.P., then proprietors of THE LANCET, to learn the Art of LetterPress Printing, which they use " and until 1921 he worked at 423, Strand, where the typesetting was done above the editorial office. When 25 years ago the printing was transferred to Messrs. Hazell, Watson, and Viney, in Long Acre, Mr. Martin joined their staff but continued his close association with the editorial and niaiiagerial departments of the journal. Among us he had by far the longest experience of THE LANCET, and he did much to preserve its standards and transmit its tradition. The apprentice became himself a teacher and counsellor, and remains a friend.
,