A Clinical Hospital Needed by W. A. Ruble

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 6, 1913

A Clinical Hospital Needed

By W. A. Ruble

A hospital is required where students may have under their care and supervision, subject to the direction of the instructor, patients whom they treat for the purpose of establishing in the minds of the students the benefits to be derived from true physiologic therapeutics. They should receive the most thorough training in rational methods of treating disease, and there can be no better provision made for this than in a hospital under the supervision of our own medical schools. The effort to safeguard the religious welfare of our young people is a most essential one, and of itself a sufficient reason for providing educational facilities of our own for imparting a high-class medical training. But we should show no less determined effort to provide such a training in rational therapeutics as will maintain the integrity of our medical work as a denomination.

There are scores of our own people who are every year seeking help in hospitals of the world because they feel that they can not come to our sanitariums and pay the prices there charged. Such a hospital as is proposed for the college will make it possible for our own people to receive the best of medical attention at moderate cost. It will also bring under the influence of the truths for to-day a large number of people from without. In this hospital they will receive as good treatment and as much kindly consideration as in any sanitarium in our midst, and the scientific phases of the work will be kept at the highest point of efficiency possible.

Another reason for the establishment of a hospital is the demand of the law, which requires of a medical school a certain standard of clinical work and experience for its students. There is no other class of people that have placed in their hands the responsibilities that come to medical people. In giving into the hands of a special class of men this responsibility, the law has a right to stipulate the thoroughness of the training that shall be given this class of people, and to say what facilities shall be provided to give such training. Seventh-day Adventists, above all others, should submit to and encourage such supervision of the medical profession as to medical training. Everything we have tried to put into our medical school is recognized as being a requisite for giving students the preparation they must have to take the lives of human beings into their hands.

W. A. RUBLE, M. D.