26 state-supported educational institutions in Oklahoma. In other respects the people of the state have been quick to profit by the experience of other sections. Oklahoma City has not in its building recapitulated the phases of growth elsewhere. Its streets are of asphalt, its large buildings are fire-proof, their plumbing modern; they have begun with enamel, not with tin or zinc, bathtubs. Why do they not in the same way avoid the weary and costly errors in educational organization that the states about them have one after the other made? Ordinary intelligence, surveying the states of the middle west to-day after their educational experience of the last thirty years, could reduce its lessons to a few simple propositions which would be universally accepted. No two judges would differ as to the principle that state institutions of higher learning should be concentrated in a town of assured future; that proprietary medical schools should be forbidden, etc. The older states are painfully correcting or paying for their blunders: should Oklahoma, to soothe the local pride of this little town or that, run up a bill of the same sort?
Oregon
Population, 505,339. Number of physicians, 782. Ratio, 1: 646.
Number of medical schools, 2.
PORTLAND: Population, 131,508.
(1) University of Oregon Medical Department. Organized 1887. Nominally the medical department of the state university.
Entrance requirement: Less than a high school education.
Attendance: 72, 65 per cent from Oregon.
Teaching staff: 41, of whom 14 are professors, 27 of other grade. No teachers devote full time to the school.
Resources available for maintenance: An annual appropriation of $1000 from the funds of the state university, and fees amounting to $8000 (estimated).
Laboratory facilities: The school occupies a frame building, wretchedly kept. It has one good laboratory, that of bacteriology, conducted by the city bacteriologist. Other branches, like chemistry, anatomy, pathology, and histology, are provided in the usual perfunctory manner. There is a scanty equipment in physiology; one thousand to fifteen hundred books, mostly old text-books, form the library. Other teaching accessories there are none.
Clinical facilities: The school has access by courtesy to two hospitals, in which students may look on. They cannot work in the clinical laboratories of the hospital, and there is no clinical laboratory at the school. Obstetrical cases are entirely insufficient.
