Medicine: Hospitals

Prudent medical students, with June term-end in sight, have already placed their applications for internships with hospitals throughout the U.S. Some hospital staffs have gained high esteem in the medical schools not only for their knowledge but, more important, their tutoring ability. Such hospitals are already flooded with applications, while most others, generally of poor teaching facilities and low prestige, will later have to advertise and wheedle for interns.

With this situation the comprehensive tablature of U.S. hospitals and hospital service which appeared last week, as annually, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was studied carefully by students, faculties and hospital staffs.

Interns. Medical school graduates, practically everywhere in the U.S. at present, must perform at least one year of internship in a recognized hospital before being acceptable as a practitioner. In the hospitals their work is supposed to be practical, the putting into practice of their academic knowledge. Their salaries are meagre, generally between $25 and $30 a month besides board, lodging and laundry. Orderlies earn $40 to $60 a month and keep. Nurses get more. But theirs is a trade, whereas the intern is an embryo professional man. He is paying in a way for his educational contracts with skilled physicians and surgeons.

The intern's ideal is to learn from the esteemed members of his staff how to diagnose and treat most accurately. The professional attitude towards patients, gleaned from frequent contacts is also invaluable. Some hospitals require rotating services, whereby the intern has. opportunity to deal with a wide variety of ailments. Other hospitals emphasize various services whereby the intern becomes a specialist of sorts and, except for the unusual man, remains somewhat fuzzy concerning the other services. Most medical school faculties recommend the rotating service for the recent graduate. The specialized service is considered advantageous for the matured or postgraduate student.

Hordes of medical students yearly apply for internships in hospitals justly famed from the work of their staffs. But such hospitals cannot place even a small fraction of the applicants. These rejected men and women turn to their next choice. Still come rejections, until the student is faced with the alternative of entering a hospital so poorly rated that his future career is endangered, or of waiting another and ofttimes futile year for admittance to a reputable institution. Meanwhile he or she does some sort of haphazard work to earn a living.