Schools for Negroes

There are only two medical schools for the 10,000,000 Negroes in the U. S.: Howard University Medical School at Washington, and Meharry Medical College at Nashville. Each has about 250 students enrolled, each graduates about 50 yearly. A few good students who can find no room, at Howard or Meharry can matriculate at a very few white colleges in northern states. The University of Chicago is the least exclusive. It usually has about 15 Negro students. But all the white colleges together have barely 100 Negroes on their rolls, graduate about 25 yearly.

How these 125 Negro graduates are to get their hospital experience is a problem which the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges last week called to the profession's attention by its reports of the Association's last meeting. A doctor must spend one or more years at a hospital before he can be reckoned reliable for general practice. But there are only seven good Negro hospitals in the country and they can accommodate only 50 internes yearly. Practically none of the rest can get posts in general hospitals. So they must get work in dubious private hospitals or sanatoriums or else start practicing unprepared. Their medical inexperience makes patients distrust them. The patients do with home remedies or go to white doctors.

Solution offered to the Association: let white medical leaders help Negro hospitals improve until they are fit to train internes; let new Negro hospitals be developed, particularly in northern Negro communities, make no discrimination between white and Negro medical students or internes, in schools or hospitals.

Howard University was founded at Washington, D. C. in 1867 by General Oliver Otis Howard who commanded the Union Army in that neighborhood. The medical school, established soon thereafter, includes white and colored students. For almost 50 years the school had little money. Teachers received little pay. Then the Rockefeller General Education Board gave it $250,000, individual whites about $80,000 and Negroes a little more than $170,000. President of Howard is Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Negro.

Meharry College goes back to a wandering Irishman who raised five sons as Methodists. Prosperous for their time (post-Civil War period), they gave their joint surplus of $30,000 to the Methodist Episcopal Church for a Christian college to train colored youths in medicine. The church founded the college at Nashville. First head and instructor was Dr. George W. Hubbard, onetime Union Army private who had hastily studied medicine. His helper was Dr. W. G. Snead, onetime Confederate Army surgeon. Present president of Irish-founded Meharry is Dr. John J. Mullowney, white.