First medical school in United States

The first physician in the colonies was Dr Laurence Bohune who arrived in Virginia in 1610 as physician for the London Company. The first physician in New England was Dr Samuel Fuller who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620.

In 18th and early 19th century colonial America, colleges for the most part prepared students for the ministry. The faculties of Harvard, Pennsylvania, Yale and Dartmouth were mostly theologians. No colleges in the colonies had a medical school before 1765.

First efforts at formal medical education in the colonies began with preceptors giving lectures on various subjects to multiple students, first just to their own students but then to other students as well.

On the 24th July, 1764 John Morgan, a young doctor from Philadelphia, just graduated in Edinburgh, met Giovanni Battista Morgagni (Father of modern anatomical pathology) in Padua. The visit to the old Morgagni inspired the young Morgan.

The first medical school in the colonies was founded by John Morgan and co-founded with Willian Shippen, Jr. in Philadelphia in 1765 as the Philadelphia College of Medicine. These lectures were conceived initially as supplementary to the preceptorship and were coordinated with it. This school ultimately underwent a name change to become the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. William Shippen, Jr had long advocated the establishment of such school. Like Morgan, he had studied abroad with the intention of preparing himself for the role of some importance. Returning home, he had given three courses in anatomy in Philadelphia. Morgan was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic, Shippen, Professor of Anatomy and surgery.

The first lectures were delivered in mid-November 1765. The same year Morgan published “A Discourse upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America”, where he set the principles of Medicine as “The Guardian of life and health, against death and disease”, with a rigorous curriculum studiorum. Since then a terrific development of Medicine occurred in terms of discoveries and inventions, according to the triad “Patient care, teaching and research”.

In 1765, when formal medical education began in the American colonies, Philadelphia was the largest city in Britain's North American territories and was foremost in cultural development among all the towns that had sprung up along the Atlantic seaboard. The College of Philadelphia (later to become the University of Pennsylvania), the Library Company, and the Pennsylvania Hospital had been flourishing for more than a decade.

The second medical school was King’s College (Columbia) in New York, established in 1768. Only these 2 schools had begun prior to the Revolutionary War. Two more schools, both in New England, were started before 1800: Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1782 and Dartmouth Medical School in 1797 in Hanover, New Hampshire.
First medical school in United States

History of Medical Academy at Cos

In 400 BC, when Hippocrates led the medical academy at Cos, documenting his patient encounters, teaching his students the Art of medicine, and writing what would become known as the Hippocratic Corpus, he was unaware that he was establishing Western medical theory for the next two plus millennia.

The origin of the academy at Cos probably dates from sixth century BC. It was centered on the island of Cos, one of the most eastern of the Greek islands; it lies close to the coast of what is now Turkey, midway between Samos and Rhodes.

Hippocrates

A collection of 70 scientific treaties produced at the medical academy of Cos were ascribed to Hippocrates. One of the books is On the Sacred Disease written in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The medical academy at Cos aimed at prognosis by a general study of the symptoms and signs of known diseases. It centered its attention on the patient and his individual reaction to the disease, seeing the clinical manifestations as the product of the interaction between the morbid process itself and the healing or naturally restorative powers of the body.

The academy of Cos, the so called Coan School, had a rival, situated on the opposite peninsula at Cnidus. The Cnidian focus was in the disease, while that of Hippocrates was on patient. Scholars also believed that Medical Academy at Cos had innovated in the field of dietetics.
History of Medical Academy at Cos

The Medical School of Montpellier

The Medical School of Montpellier was open possibly in 12th century. Montpellier was a health resort like Salerno. It may have begun as an offshoot of the Salerno Medical School.

During the 2nd half of the 13th century, many disturbances in Italy caused physicians such Roger de Parma to migrate to Southern France, carrying with them the works of AlBulcasis.

The Faculty of Medicine, Montpellier

By about 1200, the reputation of the Montpellier school had surpassed that of Salerno. At the end of the 12th century, teachers included Monks, Jews and Islamic Doctors. The earliest teaching was in Arabic and Hebrew, but Latin became of the official language by the 12th century.

Montpellier was famed as a great medical school from the later middle ages onwards, and a complex medical community existed in and around the city and the university.

Medicine was the principle service industry in Montpellier: professors, private physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, apprentices, university students, hospitals and the sick had been constant feature in the city for centuries.

The Montpellier master surgeon François de La Peyronie, who was the First Surgeon to Louis XV, was instrumental in gaining the king’s support for establishment of the Society royale de chirurgie in Pairs in 1731. After the rise of medical school at Padua its face gradually came it continue its celebration upto 1890.
The Medical School of Montpellier

The School of Croton

Croton city prospered from Mediterranean commerce, especially between Greece and the coastal areas of Gaul and Spain. Croton was famous for her medical school and for the successes of her athletes.

There is no definite knowledge of when the medical school of Croton was established (probably existed before Pythagoras), in any case, its history is intertwined with that of Pythagoras and his school and two institutions made Croton the important Greek intellectual center in Italy. Of all early philosophical schools that of Pythagoras probably exerted the deepest influence upon medicine.

Pythagoras

In Croton, Pythagoras organized his followers into a well disciplined school, and scone medical school developed at about the same time, Croton became the first and a very important Greek intellectual.

According to Pythagoras, the soul is divided into three parts, intelligence reason and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals as well, but reason by man alone. The seat of the soul extends from the heart to the brain, the part of it which in the heart is passion, while the parts located in the brain are reason and intelligence.

One of the famous students graduated from this school was Alcmaeon of Croton. He was a student of anatomy and one of the first to perform dissection.
The School of Croton

Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Salerno became the capital of an independent Longobard principality in 839 and the capital of the Norman duchy of Apulia in 1077. After1127 the capital of the now Norman kingdom was moved to Palermo but Salerno remained the most important city of the continental part of the kingdom.

The Salernitana School in the south Italian city of Salerno was the first medical school that provided the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time.

The school, which found its original base in the dispensary of a monastery founded in the ninth century, achieved it utmost spender between the tenth and thirteenth centuries during which its fame began to spread throughout the region.

According to legend, the school was founded by four physicians, an Arab, a Jew, a Greek and a Latin. Although this is only a legend, it is significant as an expression of the notion that medicine transcends all cultural and ethnic barriers.  In the tenth century the place was certainly famous for the skill of its physicians; while in the first half of the twelfth century the school is described by Ordericus Vitalis as ‘existing from ancient times’.

There are some traces of the study or at least the practice of medicine here as early as the ninth century. They may have been physicians participating in Salerno before the school was founded. In the city in fact there was a hospital or hospice (St. Maximus) founded in 820 by a cleric, Adelmo.

Salernitan School drew students and physicians from many countries and had women as students and on its teaching staff.

It was given a great support in 1224 by Frederick II of Sicily who decreed that all those practicing medicine required the approval of the school.

The success of the Salernitana School encouraged the creation of other schools with simailri methods; the most famous of these were in Bologna, Padua, Pisa, and Naples in Italy and Montpellier and Paris in France.
Schola Medica Salernitana: The world's first medical school

Hugh of Lucca, founder of the bologna surgical school

Little known directly of Hugh of Lucca (1160-1257), founder of the Bologna school, but his contribution have come down in the writings of his most distinguished disciple the Dominican friar Theodoric (1205-1296).

Hugh of Lucca, a bold and creative surgeon and teacher who left no written record of his life or work. He also known as Ugo Borgognoni was born in Lucca in the second half of the twelfth century and lived in Bologna after 1214, the year he signed a contract as medico condotto.

From 1218 to c. 1221, he accompanied the Bolognese army on a Crusade in Egypt and the Holy Land; he died in Bologna in 1257.

The Chirurgia of Theodoric, written by Theodoric which was completed in 1267, is built about the teachings of Hugh. The great contribution of this master was the ‘dry’ treatment of wounds. Growing out comments by Galen, which were distorted in the translation of the Arabs, had come the doctrine that suppuration was necessary to the healing of wounds.
Hugh of Lucca, founder of the bologna surgical school

Early History of King College School of Medicine

King College was founded in 1828. The foundation of the University marks the beginning of the story of medicine in the King College, London.

King College was incorporated by royal charter 14th August 1829 a a college for the general education of youth in which the college the various branches of literature and science are intended to be taught.

Medical Department was established in 1831. In the Medical Department all the usual branches of medical science are taught. The charter granted although it had at first no associate hospital.

Set up as a non denominational university, University College London established its own hospital in 1834, which become linked to its medical school.

At that time only two medical school in London. Hospitals of Guy’s and St. Bartholomew.

Particularly there was the usual course in anatomy and physiology and Mayo was appointed Professor and he appointed Richard Partridge as his demonstrator, for the dissecting room.

Robert Bentley Todd, was responsible for physiology and pathology. By his effort King’s College was opened links were formed between lecturing posts in the medical school and clinical posts in the hospital.
Early History of King College School of Medicine

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine – First medical school in US

The first American medical school was founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1765.

The idea of establishing a medical school in Philadelphia appears to have been first conceived by Dr. William Shippen (1736-1808) and Dr John Morgan (1733-1789).

Dr. Shippen on his return from Europe, in the year 1762, commenced a course of lectures on Anatomy. 

While Dr. John Morgan, return from Europe with an Edinburgh MD and attend teaching as the college’s original medical professor, thereby inaugurating the first medical school in the American colonies.

It was 3rd May 1765 at which the first medical professor was appointed. For its first hundred years the medical faculty taught students at the Pennsylvania Hospitals, five city blocks from the second location of the college’s buildings.

The first medical commencement was held in the 21st of June 1768.
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine – First medical school in US

History of the medical schools in United States

During the 17th and most of the 18th centuries, students seeking medical education had three alternatives:
*Travel to Europe to study in medical school or hospital there
*Become formally apprenticed to a physician willing to train students, call a preceptor
*Learn the profession in some less formal way

Apprenticeship flourished as a necessity and without effective restrictions on the who and how of preceptorship. As early as 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company contracted with sergeant Lambert Wilson to serve the settlers and nearly Indians and to give medical training to one or more young men.

The most significant medical event in the decade of the 1750’s was the chartering (1751) and opening (1752) of the Pennsylvania Hospital, which to be designed general hospital.

The very first medical school in the original 13 colonies was founded in 1765 by John Morgan at the University of Pennsylvania, which at the time was known as the College of Philadelphia.

The faculty has been trained at the University of Edinburgh and used British medical education as the model.

Two years later, a second medical school was organized in New York as King’s College. King’s college holds the distinction of being the first medical school in the colonies to formally offer the MD (doctor of medicine) degree beginning in in 1767.

In 1800, three schools graduated students, with the number of schools increasing from 52 in 1850 to maximum of 162 in 1906.

In 1797, one-man medical school was established at Dartmouth College. In 1807 a group of physicians organized an independent medical school in Baltimore, because the city had no college. Medical schools were established at Yale in 1812, at Brown about 1815 and at Bowdoin in 8121.

From 1906 to 1929, the number of schools declined sharply, largely because of the inspection and classification system begun in 1904 by the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education. 

Led by scientific progressives in the medical profession, a movement arose to require rigorous scientific training and licensing of physicians.

Established in 1893, the John Hopkins Medical School required all entrants to hold college degrees and to complete four additional years of study for graduation.
History of the medical schools in United States

1300 BC Egyptians Doctor

1300 BC Egyptians Doctor
Egyptians medicine reached a very high standard, and its reputation spread to neighboring countries. A student doctor learned from an established physician, perhaps his father, but there also seem to have been medical schools attached to the temples, and there was at least one school for midwives.

Many ancient Egyptian doctors were ‘general practitioners’ working in the community, but specialized in one part of the body. Medical texts that have survived give clues to the extent of the Egyptians’ knowledge. There were specialist books about every part of the body, texts specifically on gynaecology, books for surgeons, dentists, and vets, and books giving recipes for medicines.

Doctors were instructed that when making a diagnosis they should, first observe the patient closely, then ask questions, inspect, smell, feel and probe. If they were then confident they could cure the patient they would say ‘An ailment I will treat’: if it was a more difficult case with an uncertain outcome they would say ‘An ailment with which I will contend’.
1300 BC Egyptians Doctor