Wistar Institute - History

History

The Wistar Institute was founded in 1892 as the nation’s first independent medical research facility. It is named for Caspar Wistar, M.D., a prominent Philadelphia physician who began his medical practice in 1787. Dr. Wistar was the author of the first American anatomy textbook. To augment his medical lectures and illustrate comparative anatomy, Dr. Wistar began a collection of dried, wax-injected, and preserved human specimens. Two years before his death, he appointed William Edmonds Horner, M.D., as caretaker of the collection.

After Dr. Wistar’s death, Horner maintained and expanded the collection of anatomical specimens. The combined collections became known as the Wistar and Horner Museum. The Wistar and Horner Museum collections were further expanded under the curation of Joseph Leidy, M.D., who acquired animal specimens as well as fossil and anthropological samples. By the late 1880s, the collection was beginning to show signs of wear and neglect, a situation compounded by a fire in Logan Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, where the museum was housed.

When a fundraising campaign to refurbish and re-house the collection began, Dr. Wistar’s great nephew Colonel Isaac Jones Wistar became involved. Determined to preserve his great-uncle’s teaching collection and support new and original research of anatomy and biology, Isaac Jones Wistar funded an endowment and research building for The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. Designed by Philadelphia architects George W. and William G. Hewitt, the original building is still part of the Wistar Institute’s research facility, and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the historic University City area in Philadelphia. Today, part of the human and animal skeletal collection is housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

In 1906, under the leadership of Milton Greenman, M.D., and Henry Donaldson, Ph.D., the Institute developed and bred the Wistar rat, the first standardized laboratory animal. It is estimated that more than half of all laboratory rats today are descendants of the original Wistar rat line.