In the fall of 1765, two forward-looking physicians, John Morgan and William Shippen Jr., began lecturing at the first medical school in North America—part of the College of Philadelphia, forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania. Before then, American physicians received their medical education as apprentices to practicing physicians, thereby limiting their knowledge and skills to those of their mentors, and from scarce textbooks published in Europe. Those with means, including Morgan and Shippen, may have studied abroad at the great centers of medical education in Edinburgh, London, and Paris. The University of Pennsylvania changed those paradigms and transformed medical education in this part of the world.
In 1765, the College of Philadelphia was located on the west side of Fourth Street, between Market and Arch streets. That first campus was situated in the heart of the colonial city. On May 30-31, 1765, the College of Philadelphia held its public Commencement exercises. Over the span of two days, John Morgan, a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh, delivered his hour-and-a half-long Discourse Upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America. He stated his case for establishing a medical school and outlined the requisites for a proper medical education.
William Shippen Jr. studied medicine abroad for three years: two in London, with the city’s most prestigious surgeon-anatomists and attending hospital wards, and one year at the University of Edinburgh, from which he earned his medical degree. In 1762, Shippen began lecturing in Philadelphia from an anatomical theatre he devised in a building on his father’s Fourth Street property–coincidentally, located just down the same block from the College of Philadelphia.
The College appointed Morgan the nation’s first professor of medicine and Shippen its first professor of anatomy, surgery, and midwifery. Classes commenced in November 1765; three years later, the Trustees awarded the first medical degrees. Around the same time, they appointed Adam Kuhn and Benjamin Rush to the faculty. Morgan’s ambitious vision was off to an auspicious start.
Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, conflict of a different sort percolated in the medical school. New faculty with new ideas challenged the status quo, students became advocates for their education, and competition and curriculum reform went head to head. Growing pains were not without gains: a larger student body, renovated and, before long, new facilities, and the infusion of modern scientific discovery into the teaching of Penn medical students.
Following the lead of European medical schools, in the mid-1830s George Bacon Wood, Samuel Jackson, and William Wood Gerhard broadened the horizon of medical students to explore scientific inquiry in materia medica, physiology, and pathology.
In 1853, Joseph Leidy introduced an investigative approach to anatomy. On the whole, however, teaching remained didactic through lectures and demonstrations, and students observed operations and obstetrical deliveries at Pennsylvania Hospital and the Almshouse.
Almost half of the University’s antebellum medical students hailed from the South. Following John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, many of them transferred to medical schools below the Mason-Dixon Line and Penn accepted more local students in their place. The University continued to train medical students throughout the Civil War years, while many of its faculty members took leave to serve at local and battlefield hospitals.
The Civil War transformed American society and, likewise, lessons learned on the battlefield, in cantonments, and at field and military hospitals influenced the practice and teaching of medicine. At Penn, these wartime experiences would lead to new hygiene courses, mandatory classes on practical anatomy, and improved instruction in patient management. Simultaneously, interest in laboratory science was growing.
In the late 1860s, University Trustees acquired 10 acres north of Spruce Street, where the first new campus buildings, College Hall and Medical Hall, opened in 1872 and 1874 respectively. Thanks to additional land negotiations with the City and a fundraising campaign spearheaded by William Pepper, Jr., who generously donated matching funds to private and public grants, in 1874 Penn also opened the nation’s first hospital built by a university to advance the education of its medical students. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania effectively replaced the apprenticeship system of the medical school’s first 100+ years with bedside instruction.
A residential campus and the campus life it would offer awaited the construction of dormitories in the late 1890s. For the time being, medical students continued living at home or in boarding houses, using horse-pulled streetcars to commute to campus. The medical student body remained all male into the 20th century. However, Penn’s medical school did take a significant step toward diversity, admitting the first African American medical student into the Class of 1882.
America approached the 20th century as a world power, an industrial giant rich in steel and petroleum at the dawn of the automobile age. The world was modernizing. So, too, were medical science, education, and practice.
Penn achieved a milestone in the history of laboratory medicine in 1895 when the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine opened as a research and service arm to the University Hospital. Laboratory science gained an increasing role in the medical school, both as a teaching tool to understand health and disease and as a mission to encourage undergraduate medical students and faculty to pursue research. Construction of the Medical Laboratories Building (since 1987, the John Morgan Building) in 1904 provided modern facilities for pathology, pharmacology, bacteriology, and physiology.
The 1940-1941 catalogue for the School of Medicine stated, “It has always been the object and aim of this institution to prepare its students for the practice of general medicine, not to graduate them as specialists.” The times effectively changed that mission, in large part due to World War II and its aftermath. By 1964, more than 80 percent of the School of Medicine’s graduates pursued residency training in a clinical specialty. In peacetime, unprecedented federal funds provided resources for Penn medical faculty and fellows to explore new frontiers in science and opened yet another path for which to prepare medical students.
The nation’s entry into the war took many Penn physicians, alumni, and nurses overseas and on the seas to staff military hospitals. It further intensified the medical school experience as the four-year curriculum was accelerated to graduate students in three years. After the war, physicians who had entered military service immediately after internship increased the demand for postponed residency training. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, the postwar classes of medical students tended to be older and many more were married than in earlier years. |