Doctors Won Support for School

              THE SHREVEPORT JOURNAL, SHREVEPORT-BOSSIER CITY, LA., MONDAY, JUNE 6, 1966
Doctors Won Support for School
Tomorrow will be a historic day in
Louisiana medical annals, for Gov. John
J. McKeithen will sign the bill which
authorizes bond issues to finance, with
federal matching funds, the $30 million
Shreveport branch of the Louisiana State
University School of Medicine. The occa-sion
will herald a new era of medical
training and research, assuring Louis-ianians
that the state will continue to hold
a front-rank position in the health
sciences.
The bill received the unanimous ap-proval
of the House. It passed the Senate
with just one dissenting vote. But last
June the State Legislature showed con-siderably
less enthusiasm for the school
when the bill creating the institution
came up for vote. The Senate voted 28-9
in favor of the school, but in the House,
where 53 votes are necessary for a ma-jority,
the vote for the school was 57-43.
Physicians of the northwestern par-ishes
are l a r g e l y responsible for the
marked difference in the legislative re-sponse
to those two measures. Taking
that narrow vote of the House in 1965 as
a warning that an appropriation measure
might encounter opposition, the doctors
of the Fourth Congressional District or-ganized
a campaign to build support for
the school.
They talked to physicians in all the
other parishes, and those doctors ex-plained
to their state senators and rep-resentatives
why the school was needed.
It was made evident that the new school
would benefit all the state, strengthening
Louisiana State University instead of
draining funds from the existing medical
college, as might have been feared by
certain reluctant lawmakers. The unan-imity
of medical opinion swept away
doubts among laymen, because, unques-tionably,
physicians are the final author-ity
on the subject of their own training.
Those talks which the doctors had with
their legislators gave substance to the
endorsement of the school at Shreveport
by the Louisiana Medical Society House
of Delegates.
The Shreveport Medical Society, as-sisted
by medical groups of other parishes
in this congressional district, has been
working hard on initial planning. At
their own expense, doctors have visited
medical schools throughout the nation,
they have discussed curricula with au-thorities
on medical courses, they have
studied innovations in medical school
architecture, and they are ready to help
staff the faculty.
Actually, local doctors have been pre-paring
for the school for a long time.
Without them, Confederate Memorial
Medical Center would not be the excel-lent
teaching hospital that it is. Their
contributions to the training of general
practitioners and specialists have been
of major importance in maintaining high
standards of practice throughout North-west
Louisiana. The medical school, util-izing
the services of the center, will be-gin
on a firm professional base.
Louisiana physicians, in creating sup-port
for the school, have shown the high-est
quality of professional unity for pub-lic
interest. As the Shreveport Chamber
of Commerce observes in "Shrevescope,"
its monthly publication, if the business
elements in the community would work
together on matters of importance as the
doctors have done for the medical school,
"the growth of our great city and state
would be incomparable"