Conclusion

When casting about for an explanation of the tenacity with which the first medical school on the Pacific Coast clung to life against the odds, it seemed obvious that the legacy of Elias Cooper, significant as it was, could not account for the school's survival. Social conditions were unsettled in San Francisco, as we have seen, and far from ripe for medical education. The faculty of his new school were innocent of academic credentials, and their pretensions were resented and ridiculed by the old guard of physicians. To make matters worse, Cooper himself was the focal point of one controversy after another, as we later describe. Finally, the most devastating blow to the school's prospects was Cooper's untimely death from a lingering illness at the age of 41, only four years after his founding of the school. As a counterpoise to these unfavorable circumstances, there must have been factors intrinsic to the project that saved it from extinction.

All quests for sustaining factors indispensable to the life of the school have led invariably to the same conclusion: the school owed its survival, during the half-century from its founding in 1858 to its adoption by Stanford in 1908, to the commitment to learning and to each other shared by Elias Cooper, Levi Lane and the Doctors Gibbons. Their unwavering personal loyalty, and devotion to an institution that epitomized their common purpose, seem best explained by the bonds of kinship and the unifying source of values we have broadly referred to as their "Quaker heritage."

Lest it seem unwarranted to attribute decisive influence on the destiny of the school to ephemeral considerations such as these, we have sought to define the singular nature of the Society of Friends by following a meandering course through religious history from the time of the Reformation. This has given us the opportunity to place the origin and beliefs of the Society in perspective, and to cite the substantial Quaker influence on the inauguration of American medical education in colonial times, and on its renaissance at the close of the nineteenth century. In the process we have broadly sketched the religious aspects of the historical matrix within which Cooper's school was founded and evolved.

It should be added that the special interest here shown in the Quakers is occasioned only by the accident of history that brought a few of them together in San Francisco, thus making the Society of Friends directly relevant to a sequence of events that might well have featured some other sect, or none at all, had chance so decreed. Yet we should pause to reflect, as we leave this subject, what would have been the consequences for medical education at Stanford and in the West but for the power of the Quaker faith as a "tie that binds".