(See front cover)
A distinguished company of U. S. educators traveled last week, from as far away as Boston and Atlanta, to a long clearing in a fragrant pine forest in North Carolina. There, awaiting its first formal inspection by important outsiders, stood the most prodigious new educational project in the land this century—Duke University, now nearly complete though little grass yet grows on its sandy campus, no ivy on its neo-Gothic walls of soft-colored fieldstone.
Duke's 800 distinguished visitors at its first big public reception and showday were mostly medical educators—among them the deans of Harvard and Johns Hopkins medical schools, and Dr. William Henry ("Popsy") Welch, "Dean of U. S. Medicine." The central ceremony of the day was the dedication of Duke's medical school and hospital. Apparently these instead of the University as a whole were selected for dedication because—though no Duke man would like to say so— the medical aspect of Duke seems bound to reach maturity and fame before the institution's other branches. Money can get results faster in medicine than in the less scientific fields of culture. The $40,000,000 which the late tobacco and power Tycoon James Buchanan Duke gave to little Trinity College of Durham, N. C. in return for taking his name (TIME, Jan. 12, 1925), will doubtless turn out many an able doctor before it polishes an important poet, will probably improve physically thousands of lives before it contributes much original thought on the way of life.
Medical Centre. Duke Medical School, School of Nursing and Duke Hospital are planned as, and already are (having functioned for eight months) the greatest medical centre between Baltimore and New Orleans. Admirably designed, efficient and already smooth running, the hospital stands on a knoll behind the Medical School at one end of the campus. With a capacity of 456 beds (150 for Negroes, 50 bassinets for infants) it now has about 175 beds ready—and filled. Its staff likes to take interesting, out-of-the-ordinary ailments rather than everyday broken legs or appendectomies. Last year 3,000 students applied for admission. Because Duke hopes to distinguish itself by selecting its men carefully, only 70 were admitted. A principle adopted by the medical school's able Dean Wilbur Cornell Davison—Princeton man, Oxford Rhodes scholar, Johns Hopkins professor—is to speed up the medical course, get his men through in two or three years by means of a four-quarter plan, give them as much hospital work as possible. A pediatrist, he has helped plan the hospital, introduced many an innovation such as a shop for making braces and crutches.