Vanderbilt University School of Medicine - History

History

The first diplomas issued by Vanderbilt University were to 61 Doctors of Medicine in February 1875, thanks to an arrangement that recognized the University of Nashville's medical school as serving both institutions. Thus, Vanderbilt embraced a fully organized and functioning medical school even before its own campus was ready for classes in October of that year. The arrangement continued for 20 more years, until the school was reorganized under control of the Board of Trust. In the early days, the School of Medicine was owned and operated as a private property of the practicing physicians who composed the faculty and received the fees paid by students—a system typical of medical education in the United States at the time. Vanderbilt made no financial contribution to the school's support and exercised no control over admission requirements, the curriculum, or standards for graduation. After reorganization under the Vanderbilt Board in 1895, admission requirements were raised, the course was lengthened, and the system of instruction was changed to include laboratory work in the basic sciences.

The famous report of Abraham Flexner, published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910 and afterward credited with revolutionizing medical education in America, singled out Vanderbilt as "the institution to which the responsibility for medical education in Tennessee should just now be left". Large grants from Andrew Carnegie and his foundation, and from the Rockefeller-financed General Education Board, enabled Vanderbilt to carry out the recommendations of the Flexner Report. (These two philanthropies, with the addition of the Ford Foundation in recent years, have contributed altogether more than $20,000,000 to the School of Medicine since 1911). The full benefits of reorganization were realized in 1925 when the school moved from the old South Campus across town to the main campus, thus integrating instruction in the medical sciences with the rest of the university.