FINANCING MEDICAL EDUCATION

Our survival as a nation depends among other things on the vigor and health of our citizens. These in turn depend on adequate housing, sanitation, nutrition, emotional security, and medical care. Physicians play an important part in providing or assuring the provision of all of these. Medical service is steadily improving, and the public demand for it is increasing, but the present precarious financial state of our 80 medical schools is a serious threat to the continuance of the high quality of medical service now available (to say nothing of further improvements) and therefore a threat to our survival. Medical schools currently need a total of about 132 million dollars a year to operate.¹ This is because laboratory and clinical teaching require expensive equipment and must be limited to small groups of students and because our medical schools are engaged in necessary but costly research without which there would