The Harvard Medical School continued during 1961-62 the steady advance it has been making during the past thirteen years under the dynamic leadership of Dean Berry....
The remodelling of one of the original buildings of the Quadrangle was completed during 1961-62, and work begun on another. Since 1952 a total of $8 million has been spent in the modernization of the School's plant. During the past year 87,400 square feet of space were developed as new or totally reconstructed facilities (classrooms, research laboratories, seminar rooms and space for department libraries) and an additional 36,500 square feet remodeled. An achievement of special significance in this area during the year was the development by Hugh A. Stubbins, Jr. of the architectural plans for the new Francis A. Countway Library, which are new all the complete, with the expectation that work on the new building will begin in the spring of 1963. It is anticipated that this long-awaited structure will be ready for use in the spring of 1965.
Program for Medicine
The program for Harvard Medicine passed the halfway mark toward its goal of $58 million, reaching a total of $29.4 million in gifts and pledges at the end of 1962. Perhaps the single most encouraging gift of the year was a completely unrestricted gift of $1.1 million by the Vincent Astor Foundation. A strong effort must now be made to bring it to a successful conclusion.
The program is of fundamental significance for medicine at Harvard and elsewhere. It is Harvard's inevitable response to the urgent national need for more and better physicians to keep pace with the growth of the population, to raise standards and to meet the formidable problems of health still challenging us at every turn. Another of its purposes is to strengthen Harvard's already unrivalled capacity to produce teachers of medicine. A quarter of all the full-time teachers of medicine of professorial rank in all the nation's 87 schools of medicine owe at least a part of their training to Harvard or to one or another of Harvard's affiliated hospitals. Twenty-three of these schools' dean are Harvard-trained. Some 2,000 of the nearly 6,000 living graduates of the Harvard Medical School are known to be involved to some degree, somewhere, in the teaching of medicine. Their research accomplishments defy descriptions.
The program for Harvard Medicine aims to advance the quality of medical education, and through it, ultimately, of patient care and the nation's health. It seeks to say that medicine's need is not simply a quantitative one, but rather that special attention must now be given to strengthening the leaders in medical education and research if the quality of medical care is to be improved. It makes clear that the day of private support is not over. It directs the attention of private individuals, but even more of private philanthropic welfare foundations, back to the world of medicine, and especially to the world of medical education, where, if anywhere, the practitioners, research workers and teachers of medicine for the future must be found. It seeks to assert that in an institution like the Harvard Medical School it is necessary to have a strong network of full-time appointees who are not beholden for their support to the Federal Government, or to anyone other than the university itself; who must be free to direct their own activities as a faculty and provide the basic strength to marshal most advantageously the large volume of support now being made available by agencies of the Federal Government for projects of research. This is an enormously important program. It should command the sympathetic support of all Harvard men and, not least, of those whose heritage is that of Harvard medicine....
The year 1961-62 completion (or at least momentary completion) of a reorganization and development within the University Health Services which had its beginning in the report of the Henry L. Shattuck Commission to Review the Department of Hygiene and Stillman Infirmary submitted early in 1964. This Commission was appointed in June 1963 to study the whole problem of health service at the University and recommend a program of action. There had been recurrent worry, ever a considerable period, both about the costs and the adequacy of the program the in effect. The report proposed an expansion rather than a contraction of health service, its extension as soon as possible to faculty and employed, and its complete reorganization. It also proposed that the University replace the outmoded Stillman Infirmary with a new health building located closer to major centers of University activity....