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Dr. Franklin D. Murphy |
\ The Man of the Month I
IMAGINE the State of Kansas in 1948 writing a medical "want ad" . . . something like this:
NEEDED, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
MORE DOCTORS FOR RURAL KANSAS COMMUNITIES — State population has Increased 25% in past 42 years. Number of practicing physicians has decreased 30%. Average age of the country physician is much greater than those in _ cities. Young doctors are settling in cities instead of small towns. Seventy small Kansas communities plus the state hospitals and institutions beg for well-trained physicians, nurses and medical technicians. We Kansans must bring more doctors to our farm communities and thereby aid the rural citizens who comprise the majority of our population.
Now, figure the time, personnel and facilities required to train a Kansas doctor: Four years of University training (at K. U. in Lawrence), leading to an A.B. degree. Then to the Medical School with V/2 years spent in studying the pre-clinical sciences: anatomy, bio'chemistry, physiology, bacteriology. Followed by V/2 years at the University Medical Center in Kansas City, leading to the M.D. degree. Then a year of interneship. This is the minimum.
Add, if the student can manage it, another year or more of residency as a practicing physician in a hospital. Three years if the student specializes in internal medicine. Four to five years if his specialty is surgery.
It takes time. It takes teachers. It takes classroom, laboratory and hospital facilities and equipment. It takes patients and patience. And it takes money. (Medical educators figure six to eight hospital beds per student, in
order that he may learn to diagnose and treat patients with wide varieties of illnesses and diseases) . But you can say that last again: it ta\es money.
The school has to have money: to provide the teaching staff and the facilities required.
The student has to have money to attend the University for six, eight years or more. To get established — as a doctor, and probably as the head of a family. During their student years, as internes or residents, most doctors marry, have two or three children. It takes money — a minimum of $15,000 — just to purchase the technical equipment required by a modern physician. Small wonder, then that the young doctors tend to go into an established practice with an older doctor — usually in the city.
THE man who reversed this trend in Kansas — the man who, in effect, "wrote" the want-ad and led the state to provide its own answer — is a 34-year-old, money-raising Kansas doctor named Franklin D. Murphy who since July 1, 1948 has served as Dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine. For his achievements, the U. S. Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1949 named him as one of America's Ten Outstanding Young Men. Doris Fleeson, the Wichita girl who became a Washington columnist, says he is one of the greatest men of our time,