The Philippine Medical School was in due time incorporated with the university as its College of Medicine and Surgery, passing under the executive control of the university board of regents.
At this time the plan of which I had dreamed so many years before was in full force and effect and was working admirably. Members of the Bureau of Science staff served on the college faculty and held appointments in the Philippine General Hospital as well, one of them being the chief of a division there. Members of the college faculty carried on research work at the Bureau of Science. The great working library installed in the building of the latter bureau served as the medical library. Members of the college faculty also rendered important service in the Philippine General Hospital, where two of them were chiefs of divisions, two held important positions on the house staff and numerous others served as interns. Officers of the Bureau of Health were appointed to the faculty of the college and carried on research work at the Bureau of Science. The staff of the latter bureau made the chemical and biological examinations needed in connection with the work of the hospital as well as those required by the Bureau of Health. The Bureau of Science manufactured the sera and prophylactics required by the Bureau of Health in its work. The two large operating amphitheatres in the Philippine General Hospital were planned with especial reference to the accommodation of students, who could pass along a gallery from one to the other. The work of the free clinic, attended daily by hundreds of Filipinos seeking relief, was largely turned over to the college faculty, and increased opportunities were thus given for medical students to study actual cases.
The arrangement was an ideal one. It excited the admiration of numerous visiting European and American experts, who were competent to judge of its merits, and its continued success was dependent only upon the honesty of purpose, loyalty and good faith of the several parties to it.
Then came the untimely death of Dr. Freer. A few months later an attempt was made by certain university officers to secure control of the professional work of the hospital for that institution, leaving the director of health and the secretary of the interior in charge of the nurses, servants, accounts and property, and burdened with the responsibility for the results of work involving life and death, but without voice in the choice of the men who were to perform it.
Those who were responsible for this effort evidently had not taken the trouble to read the law, and I had only to call attention to its provisions in order to end for the time this first effort to disturb the existing logical distribution of work between the two institutions.
Before I left Manila in October, 1913, a second attempt was being made to secure control of the professional work of the hospital for the university, but this time the plan was more far-reaching, in that it contemplated the transfer to the university of control of the Bureau of Science as well; and more logical, in that a bill accomplishing these ends had been drafted for consideration by the Filipinized legislature.
The original plan for the coördination of the scientific work of the Philippine government was sound in principle and will, I trust, eventually be carried out, whatever may be done temporarily to upset it during a period of disturbed political conditions. There is much consolation to be derived from contemplating the fact that pendulums swing.
