$500,000 Medical Gift

THE Dartmouth Medical School last month announced a gift of $500,000 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, to build a teaching auditorium adjacent to its new Medical Science Building.

Dean S. Marsh Tenney '44 said the projected amphitheatre-type auditorium would seat about 350 and would be equipped with the newest audio-visual equipment and other teaching aids for lectures, demonstrations and conferences. It is one of the major planned steps in the Medical School's program to expand and improve its curriculum, double enrollment, and intensify the School's research work.

The Kellogg grant increases to $5,800,000 the total received by the Medical School to date in its capital campaign to raise $10,000,000 for new plant and faculty endowment. Other major contributions have included $1,500,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, $1,010,000 from the U. S. Public Health Service, $1,000,000 from the Commonwealth Fund, and $800,000 from the Ford Foundation.

In making its gift the Kellogg Foundation said the grant attested to its continuing belief in the significant role of schools of the basic medical sciences in the strategy of American medical education to combat the critical shortage of physicians. The Foundation recently made large grants also to the University of New Mexico and the University of Connecticut to establish two-year medical schools like Dartmouth's, which has been praised as the prototype of the sort of medical school that will achieve important educational goals of its own and also transfer men into the four-year schools at the thirdyear level where vacancies urgently need to be filled if doctors are to be produced economically and in full numbers.

Dean Tenney said the new auditorium will be an extremely important asset to the Medical School. "It will provide a forum for Hanover's rapidly developing medical center and the whole Upper New England medical community. It will serve the Medical School student body and its teaching and clinical faculties. In addition, it will provide superb facilities for events involving Hitchcock Hospital residents and interns, graduate students, College faculty members, and premedical students and other undergraduates."

Construction of the auditorium is expected to begin later this year.