Perelman School of Medicine at The University of Pennsylvania - History

History

Medical and research facilities of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The school's young founder, John Morgan, earned an AB from the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania) and a MD from the University of Edinburgh Medical School. In 1765, after spending five years training in Edinburgh and touring Europe, Dr. Morgan returned to Philadelphia and persuaded the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to found the first medical school in America. Shortly thereafter, he delivered an address, "Upon the Insitution of Medical Schools in America" during which he expressed his desire for the new medical school to become a model institution:

Perhaps this medical institution, the first of its kind in America, though small in its beginning, may receive a constant increase of strength, and annually exert new vigor. It may collect a number of young persons of more ordinary abilities, and so improve their knowledge as to spread its reputation to different parts. By sending these abroad duly qualified, or by exciting an emulation amongst men of parts and literature, it may give birth to other useful institutions of a similar nature, or occasional rise, by its example to numerous societies of different kinds, calculated to spread the light of knowledge through the whole American continent, wherever inhabited.

That autumn, students enrolled for "anatomical lectures" and a course on "the theory and practice of physick." Modeling the School after the University of Edinburgh Medical School, the need for supplemental medical lectures with bedside teaching was emphasized, which was satisfied by practitioners at the Pennsylvania Hospital.

The School of Medicine's faculty was nationally renowned: Benjamin Rush (medicine), Philip Syng Physick (surgery), Robert Hare (chemistry), and, around the 1850s, William Pepper (medicine) and Joseph Leidy (anatomy). In 1847, the group of physicians who organized the American Medical Association effectively gave recognition to the School's fame by naming the AMA's first president Nathaniel Chapman, Professor of Medicine at the School.