Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Chicago Medical Center Reopening [PAGE 7]

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profession, as undergraduates or graduates may have ample opportunity for expert and special training in every phase of Preventive Medicine*, sanitary science, State medicine and public hygiene, including school, instructional, municipal and state hygiene. We confidently expect early to experience the wholesome stimulus of the State's high standards of medical education not only as required of all who are candidates for license to practice, but also as insured to all who avail themselves of the benefit of the state's ample and munificent provisions for medical education. The high standards of medical education in the State University will serve as a spur to every other institution teaching medicine and put the state in a position equitably to demand that no institution teaching medicine within her boundaries may fall below the high standard set by the state. Believing fully that all these advances in medical education are very soon to be realized we cordially felicitate you on this auspicious occasion. WINPIELD SCOTT HALL, Ph. D., M. D., Professor of Physiology, Representing the Northwestern University Medical School. DR. ARTHUR DEAN BEVAN, Chairman of Council on Medical Education, American Medical Association: Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen: I suppose that I have been invited here to-day, not because of my own work, but because'I have been for the last ten years the Chairman of the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association. During those ten years reaJly an enormous amount of progress has been made. I should like to tell you the whole story, the whole history of those ten years, but it would take too long, and it would weary you, but I woud like to say a few things that will give you a rather graphic view of what has transpired during that period. To go back a little way, I want to say that medical education in this country was developed not as it has been in Great Britain* and in Germany, and in Europe generally, where, as in Germany, it has been from the beginning a function of the State, where in England it has been primarily from the beginning the function of hospitals, but here in this country medical education, with the rapid development that swept from the original Colonies through the great West and to the Pacific, fell into the hands of the men who made it a business. It became a business to educate doctors. There was such a tremendous demand for new men, for medical men, in the great West that the ordinary institutions of learning, which were few, far between, illy equipped for this work, were not sufficient, and during that period of development, when there was still a frontier to the United States, tliere were created something like four or five hundred medical colleges in this country. They were almost all alike. They were composed of groups of men who had a lecture room, with very few facilities, and they gave the medical instruction of their time by lectures as well as it could be given, and they really presented the knowledge of their day

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