Shortly after U-M’s Medical School opened in 1850, students started clamoring for the hands-on clinical instruction they lacked in their lectures. Faculty agreed, and soon medical students sat in a wooden gallery that overlooked their professors performing operations on real patients.
Patients from across the Midwest would travel to Ann Arbor and stay in a hotel the night before their procedure. In the morning, a professor would escort them to the Medical Building located just east of the Diag.
By the early 1860s, the need for a larger medical space became evident. U-M’s second president, Erastus Otis Haven, pled his case for a larger facility to the Board of Regents in December 1863.
“The laws of hygiene are daily violated by the crowded state of the rooms. … It is literally impossible for the professors to do justice to themselves or to their cause, or to the students, without ampler and better accommodations,” Haven said.
The regents allocated $582.12 to establish what became the nation’s first university-owned-and-operated hospital in 1869. It was housed on North University Avenue, above the Diag, in a square, two-story building with a basement.
The home’s eight rooms, heated by stoves and ventilated by opening windows, held 20 beds for the patients who rotated through the hospital during the six months each year it was open.
On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, medical students would carry patients from the hospital on stretchers across the Diag to the Medical Building for their procedures.
Victor C. Vaughan attended the Medical School during the hospital’s early years. The physician, who became dean of the Medical School in 1891, recalled in his memoir that the university’s first hospital was “nothing more than a receiving home, in which patients brought in for clinics could be kept before and after presentation to the class. There were no wards and no operating or dressing rooms, no places where students might receive bedside instruction.”
In 1875, the Michigan Legislature and the city of Ann Arbor provided $14,000 to expand the hospital. The following year, the renovated hospital opened with two new pavilions.
