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VIEWS.
VIEWS.
BELLEVUE MEDICAL COLLEGE. November 15, 1883. EDITOR VIEWS:
EDITOR VIEWS:
I am glad to hear that the University is prospering and is increasing in favor throughout the State. To an Alumnus the good name of his Alma Mater is almost of vital importance; vivat universitas.
New York City is without doubt the great medical center of the United States. Over two thousand students gather here every winter to attend the lectures and clinics of celebrated men. Foreign nations, even Africa and China, are represented, besides every State and Territory in the Union. From the surging thousands struggling for existence in this great city, scores fall daily into the hospitals or morgues, where they become texts for the professors, and subjects of study for the students.
Bellevue College is an unassuming four story brick building, situated on Twenty-sixth street, near East River. The lecture room takes up the second and third stories. It is seated in amphitheatre style, every seat cushioned. Back of the lecture table are two sliding doors which, when removed, reveal the largest chemical laboratory. The other rooms of the building are occupied by anatomical, physiological, and chemical laboratories, free dispensaries, reception rooms, offices, and the celebrated "Wood Museum," while the whole of the fourth story is given up to practical anatomy.
The work here differs much from Kansas State University work. We have twenty-four lectures a week and eleven quizzes of an hour each, nine clinics of two hours each, and fifteen hours of dissecting per week, which makes in all sixty-eight hours of work each week at the college.
One is greatly impressed by the earnestness of the professors. At the sound of the gong, the students hurriedly find seats and open note books; a professor enters by a side door opening into the pit and is invariably greeted with a round of applause. Before it has died away he has taken up his last lecture at the point where it was dropped and for an hour he labors with the earnestness of an evangelist to make plain the principles of medicine and surgery. Black board, dark lantern, wax models, the cadaver, and vivisection are all called into use to illustrate or demonstrate his subject. The gong sounds, he bows, and disappears. For the next few minutes confusion reigns supreme. Paper balls fly around the room with now and then a cushion six feet long. "Way down in Dixie," or "Roll, Jordan Roll," are emphasized by several hundred feet. Another professor enters, another lecture is taken, another jubilee is held, and so on till we are called to a clinic in the college or in the hospital near by. Fifty-two thousand patients were treated last year in three hospitals, to which the students have access. Here it is that we come in contact with every kind of disease and witness all kinds of surgical operations.
Of our professors I would say that they are eminent men, of world-wide reputation, authors of many works upon medicine and surgery. They are also capable of giving severe examinations, as some now here can testify.
The day of the cat and dog are passed and no more does the gentle (? housewife mourn her pet "Tom" or lovely "poodle," which were "sacked" by
Yours Respectfully, C. J. SIMMONS.