The hospital is now so large and so busy that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of its activity. In 1961, it admitted 27,000 patients, performed 16,000 operations, treated 62,000 people in its emergency ward, examined 115,000 patients by X ray, saw 226,000 clinic patients, and dispensed 176,000 prescriptions from its pharmacy. These figures are so large as to be almost meaningless. A better way to look at the job the hospital does is to view it on the basis of a twenty-four-hour day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. On that basis, the hospital sees a new patient in the emergency ward every eight minutes. X rays are taken on a patient every five minutes. A new patient is admitted every twenty minutes. And a new operation is begun every thirty minutes.

The hospital's operating budget is some $35 million yearly. It has grown so expensive, in fact, that the initial sum of $140,000 that was used to build the hospital in 1821 now could not support its operation for a day and a half.

The growth in patient care has been equaled by a growth in teaching activity. From a handful of medical students following a senior man from patient to patient in 1821, the hospital's student population has grown to more than 800, including 250 medical students, 304 interns and residents, and 339 nursing students.

Added to these two traditional concerns- patient care and teaching-has been a third purpose: research. Here the growth has been both recent and phenomenal. As late as 1935, the MGH research budget was $44,000. By 1967, it was $10.5 million, with another $1.3 million for indirect costs of research. The research activities have transformed the very nature of the institution, making it, in combination with the medical school, a complete system for medical advance. Discoveries are made here; they are applied to patients; and new generations of physicians are trained in the new techniques.