Percy T. Magan, MD, dean of the Los Angeles Division of the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists, had a way of meeting challenges with administrative creativity. Because of a shortage of nurses in the Los Angeles area, he proposed a plan that would involve student nurses from the Paradise Valley, Glendale, St. Helena, and Loma Linda Sanitariums for clinical experience in Los Angeles during their senior year. The plan would not only help meet the needs in Los Angeles for competent nurses, but also would provide excellent obstetrical and surgery experience, as well as out-call work for the students. Such work, he stated, would benefit them not only for work in this country, but also for work in foreign fields. It was a win-win-win situation.
In harmony with Magan’s plan, on April 17, 1919, under the topic “Nurses’ Training Course,” the Board voted: “That we express our hearty approval of the plan proposed at the meetings of the Institutional Council in Los Angeles, March 16 and 17, for the operating of an affiliated training school for nurses by the Paradise Valley, Loma Linda, Glendale, and St. Helena Sanitariums and the White Memorial Hospital, so that the nurses of all the above mentioned sanitariums will spend a part of their time at the White Memorial Hospital, all sharing alike in the benefit to be derived in certain lines of training which the Hospital is in an advantageous position to give CME’s new hospital facilities were so well received that student physicians from outside schools sought admission. In 1919, CME admitted three junior and one senior transfer students from A-grade schools of medicine. By July 1919, the White Memorial Hospital had enlarged from 64 to 75 beds, and by 1922 to 120 beds.
On April 18, 1920, Dr. Magan reported to the Board that the University of Southern California (USC) would close its medical department at the end of the year and that 15 of its student physicians had made application for the privilege of finishing their medical education at CME. The majority of these students would enter the senior year. After careful consideration of the question, the Board, “Voted, to favor accepting as many of these applicants as shall be thought advisable by the Executive officers of the school, with the understanding that on the completion of their medical course, the school from which they come will issue the degrees.”
By June 1920, following the closing of USC’s school of medicine, CME, (in 1909 the fifth school of medicine in Southern California and the school once projected to be “an enterprise that has no future,”) had become the only accredited school of medicine in Southern California. According to Harold Shryock, MD, whose father Alfred was Loma Linda’s 6th physician, its original faculty felt that they were “working under a divine mandate.” They had to succeed. And succeed they did. CME now had access to the vast patient resources of the recently enlarged, 1,400-bed Los Angeles County Hospital. In fact, many of the volunteers who had been faculty in the University of Southern California School of Medicine happily joined the faculty of the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists.
On January 30, 1921, Dr. Newton Evans, president of CME, reported the arrangement to the Constituency. “It will be well to explain briefly the occasion for the presence of the special medical students from the University of Southern California mentioned above. Sometime last Spring the Board of Trustees of the University of Southern California suddenly announced that the Medical Department at that school would be discontinued at the end of the school year 1919-20. This left a large number of their students in a very difficult situation for various reasons and as a result of this situation numbers of their students as well as the teachers in the Medical School, earnestly begged us to make plans to accommodate at least their senior and junior classes. A great deal of time and study were given this problem, by our Board and Faculty and it was finally decided to accept all of such senior and junior students as it seemed necessary to take on account of the difficulty of their finding other schools in which to finish their work. There were about twenty such senior students and fifteen juniors. It was arranged that for the most part their class work and clinics should be conducted in separate classes from our own medical students and practically all of the old medical teachers in the University of Southern California kindly consented to help in the task of carrying these two classes through until the time of graduation. These plans have been carried out and the work seems to be going along smoothly and satisfactorily. Classrooms for these students are provided in the Los Angeles County Hospital.”
CME graduated 33 medical students from the University of Southern California in 1921.