Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Chicago Medical Center Reopening [PAGE 12]

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geons and opened a medical department in the city of Chicago in cooperation with this institution in the year 1897. The immediate results of this combination were so satisfactory to both parties that a permanent contract of affiliation was made in the year 1900 under which the corporation of the College of Physicians and Surgeons passed over to the University its medical school and leased its property to the University at a specified rental, which was to be paid from the fees of students. The idea of those days as to medical education—although it is only fifteen years ago—was still a very primitive one. This was shown by the notion animating both parties to this contract that the business of medical education was, financially speaking, a profitable enterprise or could be made so. The theory was that an adequate medical school could be maintained from the fees of students alone and a sufficient surplus accumulated to pay for the plant itself, which had been or might be erected to accommodate this medical school. The idea was entirely erroneous, as events soon showed. The attendance at medical schools generally throughout the country fell off and the demand of the public for a higher standard of medical train* ing was so insistent that the expenses of providing medical education mounted more rapidly than the increase of funds from the growing number of students, or possible increase in fees, in any particular school, or all schools put together. It soon became evident, therefore,—in fact was already plain to the thoughtful man before I came to the University as president,—that the entire scheme was an impracticable one; and in my first communication to the board of trustees I called attention to the fact that the position was untenable both from the point of view of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and that of the University; and above all from that of the interests of the people of the commonwealth. The University of Illinois, I maintained, had no business conducting a medical school which was not of first rate rank. It could not conduct such a school upon the basis of fees alone, let alone accumulate money for the erection of a plant. We went, therefore, to the legislature and asked for an appropriation which would enable the University either to erect a plant of its own or'to purchase the plant of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The legislature by an overwhelming majority in both houses (thirty against six in the Senate, eighty-nine against forty in the House), made an appropriation of three hundred eighty-six thousand dollars for this purpose. The Governor vetoed this bill along with other appropriation bills, on the ground that the legislature had exceeded the amount of money in the treasury. An attempt was made again to solve the difficult situation, but every passing year was making it more and more apparent that the University could not conduct, without legislative appropriations, a medical school worthy of such an institution as it claims to be and is aiming to be. As a result, the contract of affiliation with the College of Physicians and Surgeons was dissolved by mutual consent and the University assumed entire responsibility for the management and control of the medical school on September 1. 1910, leasing the property of the 11