TULANE'S ROLE IN COLOMBIA'S Battle against disease

              THE HEAD OF A BIG UNIVERSITY in Colombia re­cently wrote Dr. Maxwell E. Lapham, dean cf Tu­lane medical school, that the South American univer­sity was going to hold its first commencement exer­cises. He asked Dr. Lapham to supply him with com­plete details on Tuiane's graduation ceremonies since he wanted his university to follow them exactly. This is an example of the close relationship between
Tulane and Colombia as the result of the medical school's current work to help the South American re­public improve its medical education.
"One reason we have been so successful," says Dr. Ernest Carroll Faust, "is that we have sent our best men down there. Other institutions doing similar work in Latin America have sent second stringers."
Dr. Faust, head of Tuiane's parasitology division, is field coordinator of the Colombia project. He first went to the South American country in April, 1956, and has spent most of his time there since. Periodically Tulane professors, experts in their fields, go there for several months at a time, to help the medical schools to modernize.
The republic of Colombia covers about 440,000 square miles and has about 12% million inhabitants. "Their health problems," says Dr. Faust, "are pretty much the same as what used to prevail here in the South."
like most Latin American countries, Colombia has had a turbulent and bloody history. The people, in­tensely patriotic, now are looking to better things.
They have been aware for some time that their med­ical education program was in sore need of an over­hauling. In 1953 they asked the US state department to send a team to make a survey. The team consisted of Dr. Lapham; Dr. Charles M. Goss, professor of ana-
tomy at Louisiana State university school of medicine, and Dr. Robert C. Berson, assistant dean and assis­tant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt university school of medicine, Nashville, Tenn.
Following this survey, the international co-operation administration of the state department asked Tulane to help Colombia improve its medical education program. The ICA picked Tulane because of the quality of its basic science and other departments, its reputation in the field of tropical medicine and its faculty's famil­iarity with Latin American health problems and medi­cal education, comments Dr. Faust.
It is the only United States institution mat has a med­ical program in Colombia. This is the first such pro­gram in Latin America.
Tuiane's program in Colombia is three-fold:
(1)   To assist in the modernization of the medical curriculum,   concentrating  on   more  laboratory   and clinical experience and less formal lectures.
(2)  To assist in the discovery of gifted young doc­tors for post graduate study in the United States or in other South American countries. (Tulane now has 11 Colombian ddctors studying special courses.)
(3)  To encourage research.
The program faced formidable obstacles. In Colom­bia medical education has been in the old Spanish and French tradition: this is largely theory with little prac­tical experience. In this system students are some­times expected to memorize the professors9 lectures word for word.
Scarcity of textbooks was in some cases acute: the library of one medical school had five books.
Although the majority of students could read English textbooks with no difficulty, almost none of them could understand  spoken English.
The custom in Colombia has been to admit students from high school directly into medical school, which lasts seven years. In contrast to this, students in the United States go into a four-year medical school after three or four years of college in which the physical and biological sciences are emphasized.
"The basic medical sciences are difficult enough for our own students, who have had college courses in physics, chemistry and biology," says Dr. Faust. 'To the Colombian students, without such groundwork, the basic medical sciences are doubly hard."
Part-time teaching is also a major problem. Most of the instructors at the medical schools, and in some cases all of them, are part-time arid have to be to make a living. Frequently they have trouble getting to class and therefore can't flunk students when they —not the students-—are responsible for their lack of preparation.    So the instructors pass everybody.
One Tulane expert met two nationals who told him they both held two full-time jobs at different medical schools. Colombia now is working very hard to remedy the part-time teaching situation.
Perhaps the biggest headache in the past has beenMAP: Headquarters for Tulane program are at Cali, Colombia