Today as on every Tuesday of the New Orleans yeart the .Let me set the stage by telling you something about what goes on at the LSU Medical School every Tuesday noon.
Of Charity Hospital's beds, 1000 are allotted to LSU, and 1000 to Tulane, while the rest are for non-teaching members of the staff. Those beds represent a post-graduate course in medical education. Every medical school graduate serves a year's interneship in any case after receiving his diploma, although as, a licensed physician, he could engage in private practice forthwith.
As an interne he puts in a period on every service in the hospital: surgical, medical, obstetrical, pediatric, eye - ear -nose-and-tnroat, and so on.
during that year he decides
what branch of medicine he proposes to devote himself to. If it is to be surgery, he applies for appointment as a "resident" in one of the major hospitals. Out of more than a hundred such applications received each year by the LSU department of surgery, three residents are selected. They received $10 a month as internes; as first-year residents they will be paid $25 a month; as senior or second-year residents they will receive $50. One of these seniors will be chosen to receive still another year of post-graduate training, with the title of head resident and pay of $100 a month.
The present head resident of the LSU surgical service at Charity Hospital is young, Dr. Robert Shepard. In view of recent discussions about the training certain public servants must have to qualify for appointment, the following statement might be worth noting: Counting the four and a half years of his service with the Army Medical Corps, Dr. Shepard will have put in 16 years of school and post-graduate courses before entering private practice next summer.
The organizational chart for treating Charity Hospital pa-tients is analogous to that of the courts. Minor matters are handled by internes—simple fractures, "lacerations, brush burns
and contusions" incurred in a traffic accident, an ice-pick puncture of the palm. The interne is thus the analogue of the recorders' courts.
Graver cases are referred to the resident surgeons—the district courts. When the residents feel the seriousness of the situation warrants consultation with the head resident it is though a matter had been carried up to the court of appeal. From there, if the life and death decision on surgical procedure is still debated, the case is referred to the supreme court—the tribunal of last resort—the Tuesday noon conference of the LSU service over which Dr. James D. Rives, professor and head of the department of surgery, presides...
