A survey of the educational system of the Philippine islands by the Board of educational survey, created under acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature.

636 EDUCATIONAL SURVEY OF THE PHILIPPINES

a part of the work is of a laboratory and clinical nature, such a condition makes thorough instruction impossible. The college is badly overcrowded, even passageways being used to accommodate departments of
study. Opportunities for a laboratory and clinical research have become greatly restricted and there is real danger that the instruction in
the fundamental branches of medicine will necessarily be given in an
inefficient manner. The college has requested the University authorities for the last few years to ask the Legislature to appropriate the
sum of P250,000 for a new building to house the Schools of Dentistry
and Pharmacy, such departments of the College of Medicine as are
necessary and especially to provide room for increased laboratory and
testing facilities. The University authorities fully appreciate the need
and have made the request, but as yet without avail. The Commission
joins the University authorities in emphasizing the urgency of action in
this matter.
During the past few decades the cost of medical education per student
has steadily risen in every country. This increase has been due largely
to a steady rise in standards and to a growing specialization. These
in turn have so prolonged the period of preparation that the time the
student has completed his studies and internship, he is so old that an
early recouping of his expenses is necessary. In the United States
the result has been such a congestion of physicians in the cities and
such a dearth of them in the rural regions that the situation has become
one of the real seriousness. If that be so in the United States, where
there is at least one physician to every 2,000 inhabitants, the seriousness
of the situation in the Philippines can readily be perceived. In the
Philippines there is not one physician to every 10,000 inhabitants.
While the country doctor is fast disappearing in the United States, he
never existed in the Philippines. What few physicians exist, are concentrated in the big towns. Of the 243 graduates of the College of
Medicine 100 are in Manila alone, 46 of them being engaged in the
college itself and a considerable number of others in the Philippine
Health Service. The Commission has no desire to suggest measures
looking to a reduction of the standards maintained by the College of
Medicine. But the time has come to consider, whether in the interest
of unnecessarily high standards and unusual specialization, the people
of both the United States and Philippines have not been made to
suffer. The population of the Philippines is overwhelmingly rural and
what the people of these small communities need is not a highly trained
specialist but a physician who can treat their ordinary bodily ailments.
The Commission wishes to pose the question whether it is not possible