Congress

Great numbers of medicos, some wearing the conventional air of sympathetic abstraction and, on their chins, the familiar bedside Vandyke, but a surprising number of them clean-shaven, brisk, straightforward men of business, convened, last week, in Chicago, at the annual Congress on Medical Education. Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University, presided; Dr. Henry M. Tory, President of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, stood up to address the brisk medicos. He told about the struggles to get a good medical school started in Canada. Others spoke on such topics as the progress of medical education in the U. S. in the last 25 years, improved methods of teaching, medical education of the public, etc. At last someone asked the question : "Why are the doctors leaving the country? Where is the rural practitioner?" The discussion ambled along; listeners caught, in its labored periods, the clip-clop of slow hoofs, the rattle of a dry axle, saw, in the rutted lane of the imagination, a buggy swaying along with reins pulling slack from the hands of a threadbare, weary man who followed where his nag took him-- down the lane, away from the sombre fields, the farmhouses smelling of disinfectant, toward the city. . . . There was, the physicians agreed, a general shortage of country doctors. Reasons? The "unprofitableness of agriculture," the "general unattractiveness of rural life." Said Dr. Elias P. Lyon, Dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School: "There never was a time when the entire population of Minnesota had adequate medical service."

A practical suggestion was made by Prof. William L. Bailey of Northwestern University. He proposed that field service be substituted for internship, that young doctors be permitted to serve their apprenticeships as assistants to rural physicians, as well as in city hospitals.