History of Medicine in New York (Volume 2); Three Centuries of Medical Progress (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXIII MEDICAL EDUCATION OUTSIDE NEW YORK CITY WHILE, as Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill suggested in his address, "Reminiscences of Medical Education in New York," medical schools are almost inevitably bound to be situated in large cities because of the greater facilities and opportunities for clinical teaching to be found there, several of New York's early medical schools which attained considerable success were founded in small towns, and some whose history is worth preserving existed outside the metropolis. One of these whose history is very interesting and of special significance was established in the early part of the nineteenth century at Fairfield, a small town of Herkimer county, not far from Utica. THE COLUEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS, WESTERN DISTRICT, FAIRPIELD The story of this Western New York Medical College is interesting not only because it serves to show how carefully New York State over one hundred years ago tried to provide medical education for those for whom the difficulties of travel, which were very great in those days, and the expense of living in very large centres of population, would have made the securing of proper medical training almost impossible. Dr. L. B. Wells contributed an interesting paper on the Fairfield Medical College to the Oneida Historical Society at a meeting held in Utica in 1890. This is probably the best available source of information with regard to the Fairfield school. This College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of the State of New York, as it was formally called, was established by the trustees of the Fairfield Academy in 1809, and as the institution at Fairfield was known to be serious in its educational purposes, the medical school opened under the most favorable auspices. By representation...