Student Life
Scholarships are available to students who need financial assistance. The students and the faculty live in a residential campus. Training in Community Medicine involves daily village visits to collect data about disease prevention awareness, child malnutrition, living conditions, socio-economic status and education status.
No. Beds: 2,695; of which 46 are Emergency, 168 are in ICUs, 248 are in community facilities, 85 are for long-stay rehabilitation of physically disabled. Patients: 1.9 million outpatients and 120,000 in-patients per year; comm. outreach to 340,000 people Daily: 125 operations; 45 births; 25,635 laboratory tests. Education: More than 110 courses including MBBS, Nursing, Allied Health Sciences, many Postgraduate medical specialities, plus distance learning courses and PhD programmes. Research: 230 publications in indexed peer reviewed journals, the second largest number of medical research papers of any medical college in India. Financial: Annual running expenses Rs.4,679 million; charitable subsidies: Rs.657 million (healthcare) and Rs.357 million (education).
The city of Vellore, Tamil Nadu, lies between Chennai and Bangalore. It has a spectacular fort, and increasingly attracts pilgrims to the “Golden Temple” at nearby Sripuram. However it is known the world over as the home of the Christian Medical College – a centre of excellence in medical services, research and education. Every day it attracts more than 5,000 people from all over India and other parts of the subcontinent.
CMC Vellore was founded by an American missionary, Dr. Ida S. Scudder. Born in South India in 1870, she spent most of her childhood in the US and was educated there. Although her grandparents, parents and most other members of her extended family had served as missionaries in India, this was not the life that she wanted for herself. However one night, while visiting her parents at their home in India, her life was turned around. Three well-to-do men came to the house one after the other, with the same desperate story. Each of them had a young wife in the throes of childbirth, but unable to deliver. The traditional midwife had been unable to help. Would the young missy come and help deliver the baby? Ida had no medical training at that point, and suggested that her doctor father should go. However, owing to the social and religious customs of the day, each of these men went away sadly saying that it was impossible for another man to see their wives. With no doctor to look after them, these three women and their babies all died that night. Ida took this as a clear signal from God that she should strive to help the women and children of India. She returned to the US to study as a doctor, graduating from Cornell University Medical College in 1899 among the first batch of women. She started her medical work in Vellore in 1900 using one room in her parents’ bungalow as a one-bedded clinic-cum-dispensary. In view of her earlier experience, her focus was on women and children; at that time there were hardly any women doctors in India.
Gradually her reputation grew and with it the demand for her services. In 1902 she opened the 40-bedded Mary Taber Schell Memorial Hospital, built using funds donated in the USA. In 1924 a 267-bedded hospital was opened on a different site, which has continued to expand there ever since. Today there are more than 2,500 beds across four campuses, and the hospital caters to nearly every medical speciality. It is equipped with a vast array of sophisticated equipment, including two MRI and two CT scanners, two advanced Linear Accelerators, a PET-CT Scan and the latest auto analysers in the laboratories. Education and Training Right from the beginning Ida Scudder knew that she could have little impact working on her own, and her vision was not just to treat, but also to train others. So she began teaching “compounders” (modern day pharmacists) and nurses. The first formal nursing course was started over a hundred years ago in 1909. Medical training for women began in 1918 with a Licensed Medical Practitioner course. In 1942 the MBBS degree course was started and in 1947 the College became coeducational. Today CMC Vellore offers, in addition to MBBS and Nursing BSc and Diploma courses, 66 post graduate medical degrees, 35 Allied Health Science courses, 8 further Nursing programmes and PhD programmes in various disciplines. Training is available in fields as diverse as Dialysis Therapy, Medical Records Science and Neurosurgery. In 2010 CMC was voted “2nd best Medical College in India” (perceptual) and top rank (factual) in the annual India Today survey and is consistently listed amongst the top colleges for MBBS.
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