Drop a penny on a busy American sidewalk and, chances are, if you do not pick it up nobody else will. That is inflation. But a three-cent stamp? It can buy a future for many a budding or practicing physician.
Elsewhere in this issue (page 451) Medicine at Work tells how a letter of application can tap a l-million-dollar reservoir of loan and scholarship funds— money made available annually through 20 state medical associations, hospitals, at least one pharmaceutical house, and, most recently, through the Sears-Roebuck Foundation. Depending on which organization approves the expenditure, this money can be used for undergraduate medical education, for residency training costs, and for expenses in outfitting or building a medical office.
Ironically, though, some of these well-intentioned funds face possible oblivion because of a relative lack of interest among the very doctors they were designed to help. What is behind the paradox that has