There's a strange new sight around Charity hospital these days. The Louisiana State university medical school has gone military and Uncle Sam's khakis are blossoming out on the hospital grounds. Where boys used to stroll around the hospital and grounds in the long tan coats, which denoted their status as senior medical students, they now wear khaki soldiers' uniforms and sailors' whites.
Every afternoon the soldiers are put through drill—they're luckier than the sailors—and an amazingly straight column, four abreast, patrols the neutral ground on South Claiborne avenue by the nurses' home. So desperate is the Army and Navy's need for doctors that they enlist these boys in the reserve corps and pay their way through medical school. After their internship, they go immediately into active duty.
Each boy is sent to a classification, center, given uniform, drill, and some say, plenty of KP duty, then is sent back to his school to continue studies, only in uniform now.
Those in the Navy are luckier. They don't have to be sent away to put in drill time with aching feet, or peel a million potatoes.They are sworn in? and given uniforms right here.
All of them seem to like it, and after that period of drill at an Army camp, most of them are straighter and sunburned. And all of them feel that they owe their Uncle Sam, who is putting them through school, a debt they can't pay until they get on active duty.
