But this is an enormously expensive project. Such an operation was made on several floors in Building D in the years 1952 to 1956 with funds from the Joseph A. DeLamar Bequest of 1919, made available by special vote of the Corporation. The total cost of these renovations came to $1.1 million and they did not begin to deal adequately with the problem of the School's need for additional space. Even if adequate space had been created, the need for new wiring and plumbing throughout the entire system of buildings is indeed a pressing one, and one which will involve a large expenditure of money.

Inadequate Library

There is also great call for several additional buildings in the School's physical set-up to remedy two of its most acute problems. Firstly, the existing Medical School library, housed in the main administration building, is woefully inadequate as it stands today. It is jammed to the bursting point. Many of the books which belong in it must be housed in Widener, and many others, periodicals and other similar publications, are stored away in boxes where they are virtually inaccessable. The School's administration also hopes that if a new library is built it will be a research library, rather than a purely "book library" as it is now.

Above the present library is the Warren Museum which also suffers from the same overcrowding seen in the library. The museum is designed to provide exhibit cases for the display of many of the instruments and techniques discussed in class. As it stands now the cases are heaped to overflowing with a mass of instruments. Lighting facilities are very poor, and the skylights have been blackened so that very little daylight can enter. If this museum were renovated, it could better serve its purpose of giving students an historical and visual perspective of the field which they are studying.

Another important construction need is for new animal quarters. The last such building, completed in 1945, was out-grown the day the animals moved in, and with the large-scale utilization of animals in medicine today, adequate housing for the School's animals becomes more important than ever.

Public Health Wants

The problem of inadequate facilities extends from the Medical School into the School of Public Health, where the problem is probably more acute than any place else at Harvard. Various divisions of the School are temporarily boarded outside the School because of a lack of space. Although the previously mentioned problem of faculty salaries is given priority over all other considerations, Dean Snyder does not deemphasize the School's physical requirements.

"The classrooms, laboratories and offices of the school are crowded and inadequate. It has been necessary to put several activities of the Faculty and Staff in buildings not owned by the School: for example, space is rented from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for cancer control and statistical offices; the department of Industrial Hygiene conducts its air cleaning research for the Atomic Energy Commission in rented quarters several blocks from the school; the Department of Tropical Public Health occupies space in the Medical School; and the Department of Sanitary Engineering is located in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge."

To remedy this acute problem, the School has proposed a new wing to be constructed adjacent to the main building at 55 Shattuck Street. It would have seven floors and would, hopefully, provide the necessary housing for the School's various activities. However, the construction, equipping and maintenance of such a building would cost approximately four million dollars, a sum not easily come by, especially in such a small graduate school (the School of Public Health has only about 160 students).

Expansion

It is important to remember that these plans make no mention of the third main problem: expansion. The School merely wants to make a home for what it has at the present time. It is content to remain small and train a small corps of "experts," but to do this job in the best possible manner the School needs to have the proper facilities, in which they are sadly deficient at the present time.

Although the problem of increased enrollment is not present in the School of Public Health, it is a major question in the Dental School, and, as a result, in the Medical School. The average graduating class in the Dental School comprises only about thirteen or fourteen men, and according to Dean Roy O. Greep this figure is too small: "The School must look forward to an increase in its graduate enrollment at some time in the future." Dean Greep feels that the Harvard system of dental instruction--in which the oral diseases are looked at not from a purely dental standpoint, but from the consideration of their relation to the entire human organism has proved its worth beyond all doubt and that the Dental School could increase its present enrollment without lowering the existing high standards of instruction.

However, the present arrangement is such a compact student-faculty unit that any increase in enrollment, however small it might be, would be very expensive. Because of this, Dean Greep explained that when the School did expand it would do so "all at once." He guessed that the enrollment would increase along the order of magnitude of "two times its present enrollment."

Integrated Problems

Since the dental students study in the Medical School for their first two years, any Dental School expansion would have to be integrated with the Medical School's plan. Dean Greep feels, however, that there is "a greater need for increasing the amount of dentists than of doctors" and that the need for dentists is "becoming acute." But there is obviously a serious block then to the expansion of the Dental School: the fact that there is no room at the present time in the Medical School for any more students in the first two years.