CLINIC, an institution that offers diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive treatment to ambulatory patients. Considered from the standpoint of organization, range of diseases treated, general purpose and function, the term may be used to include outpatient departments of hospitals, unattached units, teaching clinics— either separate or attached—health centres, preventive, curative, public or proprietary institutions. It may also be used to define a particular lecture, classroom or bedside examination where sev eral medical men express their views.
The first dispensary or clinic in the English-speaking world was founded in London in 1696 by philanthropic physicians as a means of providing medicines to accompany the services they made with out payment toward the relief of the sick poor. The Philadelphia, New York and Boston Dispensaries, founded in 1786, 1791 and 1796, respectively, had the same object in view. The modern attitude, however, substitutes medical service for medicine and a small payment for actual charity. Johns Hopkins and Massa chusetts General Hospital, by establishing outpatient depart menns in which their medical students could be taught methods of diagnosis and treatment by personal contact, are believed to be the American pioneers in this form of medical education. As for the public health aspect—the first great movement of this kind resulted in the founding of the National Organization for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis in 1905, with the conse quent establishment of 50o tuberculosis clinics during the first ten years of its existence. Meanwhile interest in the public wel fare has added further clinics, as evidenced by the following fig ures, available in 1927: In a survey conducted in 83 large cities of the United States it was discovered that 81 had well-baby clinics; 81 had venereal disease clinics; 77 tuberculosis; 68 pre natal and 31 mental clinics—maintained in large part by city health appropriations.
Social service agencies, realizing the important part that illness plays in social maladjustment, have contributed their share in in creasing clinic attendance, which jumped from 4,000,00o in 1917 to io,000,000, in 1927. This increase is largely due to greater efforts for the prevention of disease. Many diseases that in the past were not attended to until they had reached a bed-confining stage can now be diagnosed and cared for in the early stages at clinics, while specialized treatment for various diseases of the skin, eye, nose and throat, and mental, nutritional and postural defects that either were not previously recognized or have come into being as a result of present living and industrial conditions, can be cared for under conditions obtaining at the clinics. In 1925 it was estimated that the number of clinics existing in the United States totalled 5,000, as contrasted with 15o in 1900. In Great Britain the activities outlined above are in the main grouped around the great general hospitals but a few independent dis pensaries still exist and have expanded their usefulness.