Weill Cornell Medicine

A History of Cornell's Medical School

Antonio M. Gotto, Jennifer Moon

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703669
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Education

Weill Cornell Medicine is a story of continuity and transformation. Throughout its colorful history, Cornell's medical school has been a leader in education, patient care, and research—from its founding as Cornell University Medical College in 1898, to its renaming as Weill Cornell Medical College in 1998, and now in its current incarnation as Weill Cornell Medicine.In this insightful and nuanced book, dean emeritus Antonio M. Gotto Jr., MD, and Jennifer Moon situate the history of Cornell's medical school in the context of the development of modern medicine and health care. The book examines the triumphs, struggles, and controversies the medical college has undergone. It recounts events surrounding the medical school's beginnings as one of the first to accept female students, its pioneering efforts to provide health care to patients in the emerging middle class, wartime and the creation of overseas military hospitals, medical research ranging from the effects of alcohol during Prohibition to classified partnerships with the Central Intelligence Agency, and the impact of the Depression, 1960s counterculture, and the Vietnam War on the institution. The authors describe how the medical school built itself back up after nearing the brink of financial ruin in the late 1970s, with philanthropic support and a renewal of its longstanding commitments to biomedical innovation and discovery.Central to this story is the closely intertwined, and at times tumultuous, relationship between Weill Cornell and its hospital affiliate, now known as New York–Presbyterian. Today the medical school's reach extends from its home base in Manhattan to a branch campus in Qatar and to partnerships with institutions in Houston, Tanzania, and Haiti. As Weill Cornell Medicine relates, the medical college has never been better poised to improve health around the globe than it is now.

1 Origins

Ever since the University opened, its sanguine friends have dreamt of a medical department.

JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN, Annual Report of the President for the Year 1897–99

Although more than two hundred miles away from Cornell University’s campus in Ithaca, New York City was the most logical place to establish a medical school. Within a few years of Cornell’s founding in 1865, the university had started offering a four-year course in natural history leading to a bachelor of science degree. The program was considered good preparation for students contemplating a career in medicine, and a two-year version with classes in anatomy, physiology, histology, and chemistry was launched in 1878.1 Both courses of study were directed by Burt Wilder, MD, a professor of comparative anatomy and natural history, a former surgeon in the army, and a man of eccentric interests that included “brains, cats and war on athletic sports.”2 Although the programs were highly respected, there were no large hospitals near Ithaca that were suitable for training medical students. In order to gain sufficient experience with patients, Cornell undergraduates interested in medicine typically left after two years of study to finish their training at urban medical schools.3

It took several false starts before the right opportunity to create a medical school for Cornell presented itself—and when it finally did, it generated quite a bit of controversy. A group of independent physicians first tried to establish a medical school in New York between 1881 and 1885 but were unable to obtain sufficient funding to do so.4 In 1885, Charles Adams became Cornell’s second president and attempted to expand the university in Ithaca by creating a medical school, as well as a law school and a veterinary school. These efforts were frustrated when he failed to gain the support of Cornell’s board of trustees for such venturesome projects.5 Adams was also involved in extensive discussions in 1891–92 about a proposed merger between Cornell and Bellevue Hospital Medical College, a proprietary school in New York City.6 These negotiations fell through because Cornell and its trustees were averse to forming connections with the proprietary, or for-profit, medical schools of the time.

Medical education was undergoing a period of intense change at the end of the twentieth century. By 1876, there were seventy-six medical schools in the United States, and new ones were opening at a fast rate. Many of these were proprietary schools owned by professors, with lower entrance requirements than those required for high school. Very few were connected to a university or to a teaching hospital. Instruction consisted primarily of students listening to lectures that provided a very superficial knowledge of medicine, and anatomy was the only scientific subject taught in detail. After students completed two four-month terms, medical degrees were awarded regardless of academic performance.

Beginning in the 1870s, leading medical schools at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania began introducing educational reforms that marked a dramatic departure from the experience offered by the proprietary schools; the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine joined this vanguard after it opened in 1893. The length of medical school increased to three years, and eventually four. New subjects were introduced, and entrance requirements were raised. In addition to anatomy, students received instruction in physiology, physiological chemistry, pathology, pharmacology, and bacteriology. There was a shift in pedagogy; instead of being limited to passively listening to lectures and observing clinical demonstrations in amphitheaters, students became active participants in their own education. The introduction of laboratory work and clinical clerkships allowed students to learn by doing, rather than merely by watching. Students became increasingly engaged in the care of patients, and clinical teaching expanded beyond the traditional courses in medicine, surgery, and obstetrics to include gynecology, pediatrics, dermatology, genito-urinary diseases, laryngology, ophthalmology, otology, psychiatry, and hygiene.7

In the words of Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell’s third president, “the University shrank from even a nominal connection with proprietary institutions whose ultimate object was economic and financial, not scientific and educational,” since “such unions offered no prospect for the advancement of medical education.”8 If Cornell decided to associate itself with a medical school, that institution would need to be committed to educational innovation. And in 1898, a proposal to create a new medical school that would maintain both high academic standards and financial stability presented itself. It was backed by the munificence of Colonel Oliver H. Payne and inspired by the close friendships he had formed with one of his classmates at Yale, Dr. Lewis Stimson, and with one of his physicians, Dr. Alfred L. Loomis.

Payne gave Stimson, Loomis, and an entire medical school faculty the means to escape from a university administration that had suddenly turned oppressive. In the late nineteenth century, Stimson, Loomis, and colleagues including Dr. William Polk were running the University Medical College. Organized in 1841, it was technically the medical department of New York University (NYU), although the professors who governed the school also owned it and were financially responsible for it. Their compensation was limited to any student tuition fees left over after operating expenses had been paid. Degrees were conferred by NYU, but otherwise the University Medical College was an independent institution. In 1883, the eight governing professors at the time purchased buildings for the school and formed a corporation called the Medical College Laboratory. In 1892, Colonel Payne made a $150,000 donation to help his friends pay off the mortgages on the buildings, which were then held in the name of the Medical College Laboratory.

Cornell University Medical College’s Founders

Oliver Hazard Payne was born to a wealthy Ohio family on July 21, 1839. He attended Yale as a member of the class of 1863 but left at the outbreak of the Civil War to join the Union army. While a solider, he received a gunshot wound to the thigh, which became a source of chronic pain and fueled a lifelong interest in health. After his discharge, Payne went into business and became a close associate of John D. Rockefeller and, later on, a treasurer and director of Standard Oil. He also had substantial investments in the American Tobacco Company and in coal, iron, steel, and paper. A bachelor, Payne moved in 1884 to New York City, where he spent a lot of time with Lewis Stimson.9 According to Stimson’s cousin Lewis Conner, Payne was a “modest, reticent, and rather lonely man.”10

Lewis Atterbury Stimson was born on August 24, 1844, in Paterson, New Jersey, and at the age of fifteen entered Yale, where he struck up a lifelong friendship with his crew teammate Oliver Payne. During the Civil War, he served as a general’s aide in the Union army. In 1866, he married Candace Wheeler, but her health soon began to deteriorate. Stimson abandoned a career in finance, began to study medicine in Europe, and ended up graduating from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. Just two months after his wife died in 1876, he performed one of the first surgeries in the United States using antiseptic methods, a public demonstration of a leg amputation.11 According to historian George Adams Boyd, Stimson “look[ed] upon the world with the penetrating appraisal of a man sure of his integrity and who will tolerate no nonsense, hypocrisy or sham.”12 His cousin Lewis Conner wrote: “His somewhat reserved manner and cold exterior hid a generous and kindly disposition, which showed itself particularly in his relations with his subordinates.”13

Alfred L. Loomis is considered a founder of Cornell University Medical College because of his relationships with Payne and Stimson, although he died three years before the school’s establishment. An expert on physical diagnosis and tuberculosis, Loomis was associated with Bellevue Hospital and University Medical College, among other medical institutions in New York. Stimson, a close friend and colleague, introduced Loomis to Payne. After Loomis treated him for a pulmonary disorder in 1872, a grateful Colonel Payne donated $100,000 to build the Loomis Laboratory for medical research in 1886. Located across the street from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the five-story Loomis Laboratory was used by physicians and students from Bellevue and University Medical College. After Loomis’s death in January 1895, his son Henry was appointed one of the first professors at Cornell’s medical school.14

In 1897, the governing faculty of the University Medical College began negotiations to become a full-fledged branch of NYU. They hoped that this arrangement would lead to greater administrative and financial stability. The two other major medical schools in New York in the 1890s had recently made similar overtures to become university-based institutions. The College of Physicians and Surgeons joined with Columbia University in 1891, and Bellevue Hospital Medical College would go on to assimilate with NYU in 1898. According to an 1897 article in the Medical Record, the reasons for these mergers were primarily financial. As private institutions, the medical schools were unable to secure endowments or construct the facilities required to train modern-day physicians: they “had gone for years putting the moneys obtained from students that remained after paying current expenses into the pockets of their respective ‘sevens’ [faculty members]” and were now faced with “the alternative of closing their doors or of attaching themselves to some endowed institution.”15

In the case of University Medical College, however, the merger did not go as planned. Its medical faculty had made only an oral agreement with the chancellor of NYU, Henry MacCracken, regarding the governance of their medical school. They believed that they would share equally with the university in administrative decisions and faculty appointments. They also understood that in return for surrendering to NYU the property owned by the Medical College Laboratory, faculty members would receive fixed salaries paid by the university. This property included the Loomis Laboratory, built by Colonel Payne in honor of his physician, and its $250,000 endowment.

After becoming incorporated as part of NYU, the professors were unpleasantly surprised to discover that control of the University Medical College was now entirely out of their hands. A stipulation that faculty salaries would not be fixed, but instead based on what each professor would have earned in private practice, especially rankled. A story in the New York Evening Post suggests that contemporary observers considered the university’s actions a form of trickery: “It became manifest that it was the purpose of the university council to violate the agreement upon which they had got possession of the property of the medical laboratory, and to drive the old faculty out, leaving the university the possessors of property acquired under false pretences, and without the burden of consulting or advising any gentleman to whose generosity they were indebted for the property.”16 In November 1897, some of the members of the council then responsible for governing the University Medical College, which included Colonel Payne, resigned. The disgruntled faculty members, believing that they had been deceived by MacCracken, proceeded to sue NYU for the restoration of property. The faculty members of the University Medical College then attempted to forge connections with Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Cornell.

On February 22, 1898, Payne and Stimson met with Cornell president Jacob Schurman to offer a proposal to form a new medical school. Most of the faculty of the University Medical College would move to Cornell, bringing with them the Loomis Laboratory and its endowment. Payne offered to finance the construction of a building worth at least $100,000 and would provide a guarantee that the financial costs of a new medical college would not be the responsibility of Cornell University for a period of five years. In addition, it was likely that many students from University Medical College would follow their professors and move to Cornell.17

Payne’s offer was well timed. There was a pressing need for well-trained doctors and adequate patient care facilities in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, as the city was undergoing a period of rapid industrialization that severely impacted public health. Newly arrived immigrants frequently lived in teeming tenement houses, which lacked proper venti...