York. Most of them were international medical school graduates. Many rural
Florida towns in the Panhandle and farther south attracted them from India and
elsewhere. Those towns would pay big sums of money to hire lawyers and get
visas for these doctors so they could stay in their towns and practice medicine for
some period of time.
I attended a hearing in Madison, Florida, with one of the consultants for our
proposed college of medicine, Margaret Lynn Dugger. People there said that they
had recruited such doctors – but that the doctors didn’t stay long in the little
towns of the Panhandle or North Florida. They ended up in Miami or Tampa
or one of the other golden cities farther south, where there was big money to be
made in cardiology and surgery and such. I’m not criticizing New York for being
kind enough to provide doctors for us, because our own state was not educating
the doctors to take care of its own people. We had three medical schools and, as
the MGT report showed, we were not producing enough doctors to meet the
needs of rural, elder or inner-city residents. That’s what the need for a school at
Florida State was all about.
There was another element to this New York problem: Many students in
Florida who wanted to go to medical school didn’t get that opportunity. There
were three medical schools here – University of Miami, University of South
Florida and University of Florida – but there was no medical school close to
home for those in the upper part of the state. At the hearing I attended with
Margaret Lynn, some North Floridians testified that having a medical school at
Florida State would increase the likelihood that they would not only apply to
medical school in the state but, after graduation, come back to their hometown
to practice medicine.
So we went to work to meet this need. It was not good for Florida to be
depending on the kindness of strangers for its physician workforce. On one particular
day, the Board of Regents – the state’s higher-education governing board
at the time – was meeting in Tallahassee to talk about the possibility of a new
medical school at Florida State. On the table in front of them sat the MGT
report that I was talking about – the one with the data that showed the great
need of the rural counties. In fact, one rural county had only one doctor to serve
the medical needs of thousands of patients, some of them elders, some of them
poor. We hoped the regents would have read that report in preparation for the
meeting.
At the meeting, a certain Board of Regents member – an alumnus of the
University of Florida, whom we’ll call Regent X – cornered me, kind of as a
cat would corner a mouse. He asked, “Myra, why in the world does Florida
State need a medical school?” And I said, “You’re asking the wrong question,
but you’re asking the right person. The real question is: ‘Why does Florida need
another medical school?’ And you’re asking the right person because I know all
24 | Breaking the Mold