Resources available for maintenance: Mainly fees, amounting to $17,850 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: Student laboratories, with individual equipment adequate to routine instruction, are provided for chemistry, pathology, histology, and bacteriology; the professors of the last three subjects have private laboratories besides. The provision for anatomy is poor; it comprises an ordinary dissecting-room and a lecture-room, equipped with a papier-mâché model, charts, a defective skeleton, and some odds and ends of bones. The outfit for experimental physiology and pharmacology is small. Animals are obtained as needed. There is a small museum and a small library. Quiz-compends are sold on the premises.
Clinical facilities: The school has access to several hospitals where clinical material is obtained. Its use is subject to the customary limitations. The main hospital is two miles from the school. Though 90–100 beds are there available for ward teaching, students cannot work in the clinical laboratory of the hospital. Opportunities at the other hospitals are not considerable.
Several large and well arranged rooms in the college building are used for dispensary work, one hour daily. The attendance is fair.
Date of visit: April, 1909.
General Considerations
In Nebraska, as in most of the western states, the hope of sound instruction in medicine lies with the state university. There is apparently no other institution in the state which can confidently count on spending much more on a medical department than fees bring in, though Creighton has succeeded in obtaining gifts for building purposes. The problem confronting the state university, however, is not simple. It has undertaken to require two years of college work for entrance, while the state law does not contemplate the enforcement of even a high school standard. The strengthening of the law, by way of backing the state university, ought not, however, to be difficult, for the eclectic school is surely without influence and Creighton has promised to come to the higher standard in 1910.
A more perplexing problem arises from the division of the state university department between Omaha and Lincoln. The edges of the two halves do not now touch. If our position in respect to divided schools is correct, the state must choose between wholly dropping clinical instruction and organizing a complete school on one of the two sites now partially occupied. An entire department at Omaha seems at this moment the more feasible.
New England
The medical schools of Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut (nine in all), may profitably be considered together, for the reputable ones among them are largely engaged in training local students, 85 per cent of their enrolment
