Willamette University Medical Department records

In 1864, Governor A. C. Gibbs and a number of Portland physicians requested that the Board of Trustees of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, establish a medical department in Portland, to be called the Oregon Medical College. The department closed soon after its founding due to lack of organization by the faculty. It is unclear whether or not the department ever offered any instruction. By 1866, Willamette University had a new president, Dr. J. H. Wythe, who began efforts to establish a medical department in Salem. A committee appointed by the university’s Board of Trustees ordered the officers of the Medical Department in Portland to surrender the charter granted to them by the university, and lectures began in Salem on March 3, 1867.

On February 8, 1878, the Oregon Medical College was incorporated in Portland. Though it bore the same name as the Portland campus of the Willamette University Medical Department, created thirteen years earlier, the college was an independent entity. The original founders, stockholders and faculty, Rodney Glisan, Philip Harvey, Matthew P. Deady, William H. Watkins, William B. Cardwell, R. G. Rex, William H. Saylor, and O. P. S. Plummer, resolved, on April 15, 1878, at a meeting of the faculty, that “the interests of the medical profession of the Northwestern States and Territories adjacent require the maintenance of one institution for medical education and that the city of Portland, by reason of its greater population, the clinical material available in its several hospitals and the greater number of competent resident physicians and surgeons who may be engaged as teachers, is better adapted for the location of such an institution than any point north of San Francisco” (Volume I, p. 23).

It was noted in the minutes that the faculty recognized and appreciated the efforts and successes of the faculty at the Willamette University Medical Department, and did not wish to do injury to the existing school in Salem by establishing a medical school in Portland. Therefore, it was resolved that a committee of three be invited from Willamette University to confer with a similar committee from the Oregon Medical College to harmonize their efforts. On June 5, 1878, resolutions were made in Portland to accept the recommendations of the President and the faculty of the Willamette University Medical Department, that on the abandonment of the Oregon Medical College, the Willamette University Medical Department would move to Portland. The Oregon Medical College was unincorporated, and stock was canceled at a meeting of the stockholders, June 17, 1878.

The Willamette University Medical Department relocated from Salem to a site on Fourth Street, between Morrison and Yamhill, with a dissecting room in a livery stable on Park and Jefferson. In 1886 a new building was constructed at Fourteenth and Couch, which was occupied in 1887. On April 8, 1887, schisms among the faculty led to the resignation of many of its strongest members: William H. Watkins, James Brown, E. P. Fraser, Otto S. Binswanger, Arthur D. Bevan, A. C. Panton, Richmond Kelly, Frank B. Eaton, Kenneth A. J. Mackenzie, Holt C. Wilson, Simeon E. Josephi, and George M. Wells. Several of these men helped organize a rival school, the Medical Department of the University of Oregon.

The Willamette Medical Department stayed in Portland until 1895, when it returned to Salem and appointed physicians from the Salem area. In 1910 the department failed to meet the standards of the Council on Medical Education and on May 5, 1913, having graduated two hundred and thirteen since its inception in 1867, the department was discontinued. Then it was absorbed by a merger with its former rival, the University of Oregon Medical School.

(Source: Larsell, Olof. The Doctor in Oregon. A Medical History. Portland, Oregon: Binfords and Mort for the Oregon Historical Society, 1947.)