The organization of an American university medical clinic.

  • Janeway, Theodore C. (Theodore Caldwell), 1872-1917.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The organization of an American university medical clinic. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    should nominate all candidates for vacancies in any position in the clinic. He should have the supervision of all expenditures. He should be at the hospital for at least six hours during each working day, and for at least nine months of the year. Whether he should ]3e allowed a limited consulting practice outside of the hospital would depend upon the available resources of the university to com- pensate him properly, and upon the provision for his receiving pri- vate patients at the hospital. It would seem to me to be clearly to the advantage of the hospital that he and the assistant director should have consulting rooms in the hospital, where patients might come to them, and rooms for the treatment of private patients. The out-patient department should similarly be under the charge of a physician in chief, who should directly represent the director and who might serve in the hospital under the assistant director during vacations. He should have the direct oversight of all in- struction in physical diagnosis and of expenditures. A medical clinic such as has been outlined could undertake the whole instruction in medicine of from one hundred to one hundred and twenty students. An analysis of its organization shows at once that it is the British or Scottish teaching hospital, surmounted by a German university clinic. Our American hospitals were the direct outgrowth of their British predecessors, but they had to be cramped and modified to meet conditions originally provincial; now, in our large cosmopolitan cities, they are rapidly returning to their original lines. It does no violence to tradition, therefore, to inte- grate them into a great university medical school and to add to them that coordinating activity of a clinical master, which shall develop their latent possibilities of larger educational usefulness, and permeate them with that atmosphere of tireless scientific inves- tigation, which Americans seek in Germany today. Is it too much to hope that, with American energy and open-handed American generosity at our disposal, the talent for organization—which has been so marked a feature of our contemporary industrial life—may in the next generation make of our American medical clinics insti- tutions for the treatment of the sick, sought alike by poor and rich, and centers of instruction for the world? Theodore C. Janeway, M.D. College of Physicians and Surgeons, 437 West sgth Street, New York.