Schools

School of Medicine

Few Emory stories are as complex as that of the growth of the School of Medicine. Fortunately Professor Willis Hurst has told most of it in his history of the Department of Medicine, The Quest for Excellence (1998). Here is the long story made short, with help from Sylvia Wrobel, assistant vice president for health sciences communications (now retired).

In 1854—seventeen years after the founding of Terminus and nine since its name change to Atlanta—seven of the town's physicians formed the faculty of Atlanta Medical College, offering classes in city hall (where the Capitol now stands), and later moving to a hospital building on Butler Street. Legend says that this building was spared from the burning of Atlanta by Union troops in 1864, when a professor instructed students and staff to impersonate wounded and ill patients—thus persuading gullible but humane soldiers to leave the patients in peace.

Fourteen years later, in 1878, a faculty fist fight over how to refurbish the old building led to the departure of some of the physician-professors, who founded the rival Southern Medical College on Edgewood Avenue. When the city built Grady Memorial Hospital across the street from Atlanta Medical College on Butler Street in 1892, Southern Medical College relocated to Butler Street itself, to a new building right next door to the older school, exacerbating their rivalry. The emergence of a leader trusted by both faculties, Dr. W. S. Elkins, enabled the two schools to merge in 1898 and form the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons.

This happy marriage lasted for seven years, when another faculty disagreement spurred one faction to leave and hound the Atlanta School of Medicine.  It and the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons coexisted uneasily until 1913.

Meanwhile, the practice of medical education in the United States was being changed significantly by pressures from the professional guilds to standardize credentials. In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation financed a survey of medical education. The report by Abraham Flexner, taking note of a disturbing irregularity in quality from school to school, recommended that proprietary medical schools, such as the two in Atlanta, affiliate with universities to strengthen their scientific curriculum and raise their academic standards. The American Medical Association and the American Association of Medical Colleges endorsed the Flexner Report, and pressure mounted for Atlanta's two medical schools to come into line with the recommendations. Once again two schools became one, as the two merged in 1913 and took the name of the earliest medical school in the city, the Atlanta Medical College. Still, with a largely voluntary faculty and no endowment, the two schools had difficulty meeting the higher costs of more rigorous training.

Thus, when the Educational Commission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, announced in July 1914 that a new university would be established in Atlanta, the medical college immediately sought to associate with the university. On May 24, 1915, the Atlanta Medical College transferred its assets to Emory and became the Emory University School of Medicine. The Carnegie Foundation chipped in $100,000 to aid the transition, and the University itself appropriated funds to build new classrooms and laboratories in Druid Hills. With additional funding from Asa Candler, Wesley Memorial Hospital was moved from the old Calico House on Courtland Avenue to its new facilities at the University in 1922. It would be renamed Emory University Hospital in 1932.

Since then, the growth of the medical school has curved exponentially upward, aided in no small part by the largesse of Robert Woodruff, the strength of The Emory Clinic through its first five decades, a research engine fueled by federal dollars, and strong affiliations with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston. Other affiliates, such as the Wesley Woods Geriatric Center, would in time become fully part of the University.

The school's teaching facilities include not only Emory University Hospital but also Crawford Long Hospital, named for the Georgian who first used ether as an anesthetic. The hospital was given to Emory in 1939 by its founders, Drs. Luther C. Fischer (1899M) and Edward C. Davis (1930H), with the stipulation that Emory not have complete authority for its management and governance until Fischer's death. Fischer died in 1953.

Grady Hospital has played a critical role in the education of Emory medical students from the beginning, when the school built on the teaching relationships established before the turn of the century between Grady and the former Atlanta College for Physicians and Surgeons. Since the 1930s formal agreements have enabled Emory to train medical residents at Grady while providing nearly all of the care for Atlanta's indigent population, sharing some of that responsibility with the Morehouse School of Medicine since the late 1980s.

Part of the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which was created in 1966 as an umbrella organization to coordinate the work of Emory's health-related schools, hospitals, and clinics, the School of Medicine has developed strong collaborations, including Ph.D. programs with the basic sciences departments of Emory College and a unique biomedical engineering doctoral program with Georgia Tech.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.