MEDICAL EDUCATION AND THE RISE OF HOSPITALS

Without hospital facilities present-day medical education is quite unthinkable. The teaching of modern clinical medicine involves a complicated web of diagnostic facilities and other services that only a hospital can provide. All this we take so much for granted that we may fail to realize the difficulties that attended the growth of this relationship.

While medical progress can be clearly correlated with the rise of hospitals, there is no simple causeand-effect relationship. The layman, influenced by current mass communication media, may think of hospitals in a particularly dramatic vein, as the locus of the triumphs of modern surgery. Such triumphs derive from the discovery of anesthesia and the development of bacteriological science, dating more or less from the middle of the last century. But it is not merely the discoveries in physical and chemical and biological sciences which have wrought the vast changes, nor yet the technological improvements. There has