After Stafford Leake Warren's family moved from New Mexico to Hayward, Calif, in 1899, young Staff used to run errands for the town drugstore. This emporium still stocked leeches and bleeding cups for one of the local doctors, a spry oldster who had never gone to medical school. Half a century and a couple of medical revolutions later, Dean Stafford Warren of the University of California School of Medicine at Los Angeles looked on pridefully on Graduation Day as the 33 men and three women of his second graduating class won the right to put the cherished initials M.D. after their names.
The modest crop from U.C.L.A.'s burgeoning med school was a welcome addition to the estimated 7,000 new doctors just graduated from the nation's 75 accredited four-year medical colleges. As products of the nation's shiniest new med school, designed from the first to profit from the mistakes and experiences of others, the 36 young doctors from U.C.L.A. could boast of the most modern medical education possible.
Friendly Paw. When U.C.L.A. set out in 1946 to build a new school from the ground up, it tapped Stafford Warren, a great bear of a man (6 ft. 4 in., 210 Ibs.) with a disarmingly friendly right paw. He had completed 20 years on the faculty of the University of Rochester Medical School, had spent three years as health guardian of the people involved in atomic-energy work from Los Alamos to Bikini.
Warren and the faculty that he began to assemble took three years to decide on a curriculum. They culled the teaching techniques of their own old schools and others, paying special attention to those schools that were getting to be known as innovators. Outstanding among them: Cleveland's Western Reserve University. Warren & Co. followed Western Reserve's lead in switching away from what is called the "block system," prevalent in conventional medical schools. Under this system, the student starts with anatomy and keeps on studying it through his first year without regard to its specific meaning in terms of patients' health. After anatomy come physiology and pathology—each important subject taken up without relation to the other.
U.C.L.A. decided to teach everything at once, or nearly so. As a result, its medical freshmen spend their first year learning only about normal man—his psychological and biological aspects in terms of structure, function, growth, behavior, the effects of environment. At every step anatomy, physiology and biochemistry are correlated. The next 18 months deal with disease. The last terms include full-time bedside and clinic experience.
It is a rugged course and the student has to devour his books, but he need never sweat his grades because at U.C.L.A. med school there are none. If a man is doing badly, a faculty member will advise him. If he wonders how he is getting along, he has only to ask a prof, who will find out and tell him. Under U.C.L.A.'s system, only one student has been flunked, out of the first 196 enrolled.