The interactive Michigan Medicine timeline includes many milestones, from the events leading to the Medical School’s founding up to the 21st century.
Some key highlights:
The Medical School was the second college, and the first professional school, established at U-M. It was called the Department of Medicine and Surgery for its first 65 years. The name was officially changed to Medical School in 1915.
U-M was the first university to make its Medical School professors part of the main faculty, which continues today. U-M’s hospitals and health centers in Ann Arbor and southeast Michigan are staffed by U-M faculty physicians and serve as training sites for students in U-M’s medical and health professions programs, as well as for residents and clinical fellows.
The nation’s first university building devoted to chemistry teaching and research opened at U-M in 1856, a key component of the science-based training of physicians.
In 1869, thanks to efforts by Medical School faculty, U-M became the first university in the United States to open a teaching hospital, in a former professor’s house on the Diag where the Chemistry Building stands today.
U-M was the first major medical school to accept women alongside men, starting in 1870, although the number of female students was small for decades. Today more than half of the incoming class identifies as female. Amanda Sanford, who had started her training elsewhere, was the first female graduate, in 1871.
U-M also was an early leader in enrolling applicants of color in its medical school, with William Henry Fitzbutler becoming the first Black graduate in 1872; José Celso Barbosa the first Puerto Rican to earn a medical degree from any continental U.S. university in 1880; Sophia Bethena Jones receiving the first medical degree awarded to a Black woman in 1885. The school’s first Asian male and female graduates were Myatt Kyau in 1882, and Shi Meiyu (known as Mary Stone) and Kang Cheng (known as Ida Kahn), both in 1896. However, students of color faced discrimination in medical student housing, clerkships and residency training at U-M hospitals until at least the World War II era.
Graduate study in the biomedical sciences began in the 1870s. One of the first two doctoral degrees awarded by U-M in 1876 went to a student and Medical School instructor who later earned an M.D. Graduate studies were formalized over time through a partnership with the Rackham Graduate School.
In 1886, a Hygienic Laboratory run by the Medical School was one of the nation’s first to provide education and research in “germ theory” of disease. It also served the state by testing milk, water and food for dangerous microbes to protect public health.
In 1889, U-M opened the Anatomical Laboratory, the nation’s first building devoted to hands-on instruction in human anatomy. This paved the way for a four-year medical curriculum to be introduced in 1890, one of the first in the nation.
The Medical School was the first in the nation to introduce the concept of the clinical clerkship for medical students, in 1899, taking advantage of the university-owned hospitals that had opened in 1891 on Catherine Street to provide hands-on clinical training. Also that year, the school became among the first in the nation to offer a formal program of clinical training for recent medical graduates, referred to as interns.
The Medical School established the Department of Postgraduate Medicine in 1927. It was the first academic department in the U.S. to focus on continuing medical education for physicians already in practice.
In many disciplines, U-M was the first or among the first to establish departments, divisions, centers, institutes and professorships devoted to a subspecialty. These ranged from pharmacology and human genetics to bacteriology, radiology and depression.
The Veterans Administration opened a hospital just down the road from U-M’s medical campus in 1953. It was staffed by U-M faculty physicians — a partnership that continues today.
The Medical School had administration, classroom and research buildings on the Diag until the late 1950s, when the Medical Science complex opened on “The Hill” near the hospitals.
From their early decades, the school and hospitals relied on the willingness of patients to take part in the training of rising physicians as part of receiving care from U-M medical faculty. Many research studies also drew biological samples, data and clinical trial volunteers from patients and the community. Today more than 100,000 people have joined a registry of potential clinical research volunteers.
