The dispensary has an attendance varying from two to seven daily.
Date of visit: May, 1909.
SALEM: Population, 7287.[1]
(2) Willamette University Medical Department. Organized 1865. An independent institution in all but name.
Entrance requirement: Less than a high school education.
Attendance: 29, 86 per cent from Oregon.
Teaching staff: 16, of whom 15 are professors.
Resources available for maintenance: Fees, amounting to $3580 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: The school has a fairly well equipped laboratory for bacteriology and histology; a small laboratory, with little material and no running water for chemistry; and a dissecting-room. There are no museum, no books, no other teaching accessories. Inquiry on the subject of physiology elicited the response that the "apparatus is in a physician's office downtown."
Clinical facilities: These are hardly more than nominal. Students have some access to a private hospital of 30 beds in Salem and to the State Asylum and Penitentiary a few miles distant. "Medical clinics depend on cases." Obstetrical cases "depend on private practice."
There is no dispensary at all.
Date of visit: May, 1909.
General Considerations
Neither of these schools has either resources or ideals; there is no justification for their existence. The entire coast is oversupplied with doctors by immigration; unless something better can be made than can be thus readily obtained, the state will do well to let the field lie fallow.
The Salem school is an utterly hopeless affair, for which no word can be said. Portland may conceivably some day maintain a distant department of the state university. Until, however, the financial strength of the state university permits it to develop there a school equal, for instance, to that which the University of Texas supports at Galveston, it has no right to allow a group of local doctors to exploit its name in the conduct of a low-grade proprietary institution. That out of its own slender revenues it should divert a thousand dollars annually into the coffers of this concern is well-nigh incredible.
- ↑ Not estimated by U.S. Census Bureau.
