Move at Stanford Med

Ever since Stanford University began teaching medicine in 1909, its students have led an academic double life. At the university campus in Palo Alto, they learned anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology and physiology. At the 237-bed San Francisco Stanford Hospital on Clay and Webster Streets, 35 miles away, they studied pharmacology and pathology, did their clinical work under a topflight, largely volunteer staff of local physicians and surgeons, long rated as one of the best in the country.

Last week in Palo Alto, amid the pomp of an academic convocation, President J. E. Wallace Sterling dedicated Stanford's handsome new $21 million medical center (complete with 434-bed hospital), designed by Manhattan Architect Edward D. Stone (TIME, March 31, 1958). For the university's med students, who can now fulfill their degree requirements without commuting to another campus, the center is an unqualified blessing. But in San Francisco medical circles, the center is an object of much discussion and no little concern.

Direct Methods. At the hub of the argument is Stanford's new dean of the School of Medicine, Pediatrician Robert Alway, 54, a hard-driving administrator whose passionate interest is to improve his school. He is also a man of tough, direct methods. When he was chosen as dean last year, med-school department heads submitted their resignations as a matter of course. Customarily, the new dean refuses. Not Alway.

On the theory that Stanford had been weakened by too much scholastic inbreeding (i.e., some department heads and professors had simply floated to the top on the strength of longevity), Alway had gone scouting for new blood, and he quickly hired a dazzling array of new men for top jobs, e.g., Pediatrician Norman Kretchmer from Cornell, Nobel Prizewinning Geneticist Joshua Lederberg from the University of Wisconsin, Biochemist Arthur Kornberg (along with several members of Kornberg's department) from Washington University of St. Louis. So far, Alway has replaced three department chiefs, created a new department (genetics), added eleven new full professors.

The men who were replaced were understandably bitter, and none more so than the staff of the old San Francisco hospital. Stanford will support the hospital only for another year while staff members try to find a charitable organization interested in keeping it open. After that, the hospital is on its own. Its 162 fulltime staffers and its 520 part-time volunteer clinicians (most of whom have sizable city practices) must either move or commute to Palo Alto or lose their Stanford affiliation. The upshot: when classes open at the university next week, 75% of the hospital's clinical staff will be new, and some doctors feel that the talent available in the suburbs is no match for what Stanford has left behind in San Francisco.

Five Years of Study. Stanford disagrees that there will be any drop in quality, points out that under its new curriculum it will need much less help from volunteer clinicians. Inspired by the program undertaken seven years ago by Cleveland's Western Reserve University (TIME, July 2, 1956), the Stanford curriculum has been completely rebuilt to "humanize" the doctor by spreading his studies over five years instead of four, teaching him more about the patient as a whole and less about medical specialties, at least at the start. Med-school freshmen will begin with wide-ranging courses that relate basic medical disciplines. And as the students advance toward their doctorates, the proliferation of specialized courses will be cut down, allowing them to spend about one-fourth of their time in the sciences, humanities and other fields allied to their major study.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.