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Timeline continued from If These Walls Could Talk



Medical alumni who graduated prior to the 1915 merger were given opportunity to receive a new Emory University diploma in exchange for one awarded by one of Emory’s forebear medical schools.

Evangeline Papageorge became the first woman appointed to the full-time medical faculty. She would later become the school’s first female administrator when she was appointed dean of students in 1956. She is remembered fondly bylegions of alumni, whocreated the Papageorge Teaching Award in her honor.
Like Cy Strickler and Steward Roberts, volunteer faculty member and renowned medical leader James Paullin led Emory’s Department of Medicine. He served as president of the American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, and American Clinical and Climatological Society.
This same year, Daniel Elkin, nephew of W.S. Elkin, became chair of surgery till 1954. Heimproved the surgical curriculum, elevating teaching to equal footing with clinical activities and adding a year to the surgical residency.

Also this year, Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center was established in Florida. Acquired by Emory in 1956, it moved to Atlanta in 1965 and is now called Yerkes National Primate Research
Emory medical instruction at Grady Hospital, previously restricted to the
African-American wards, was extended to the white wards as well.
Coca-Cola leader Robert W. Woodruff donated $50,000 to found a cancer clinic named for his grandfather-known today as the Winship Cancer Institute. To lead the cancer clinic, he recruited Elliott Scarborough, who later was key to the formation of The Emory Clinic.
At the request of the US Surgeon General, Emory organized its second Emory Unit (43rd General Hospital, first organized in WWI) in preparation for service in WWII.
This same year, Luther Fischer deeded Crawford W. Long Hospital to Emory, the gift to take effect at his death. The hospital came under Emory management in 1953 and today is known as Emory Crawford Long Hospital.
Elizabeth Gambrell, who already held a PhD, became the first woman to be admitted to Emory’s School of Medicine.
Eugene Stead, 32M, already chair of medicine, became dean. At 37, he was well on his way to becoming one of the giants of American medicine. He helped develop Georgia’s first cardiac catheterization lab, at Grady hospital, at a time when there were only two others in the world, in New York and London. A revered researcher and teacher, he attracted other brilliant faculty to Emory, including Paul Beeson, and helped propel the school towards greatness.
Bruce Logue established Emorys first cardiology residency at Grady Hospital. Often called the father of cardiology at Emory, Logue helped establish a strong relationship between cardiology and cardiac surgery.
Also in 1946, Hugh Wood became dean, serving till 1956.

Also this year, The VA Medical Center entered into an agreement, stipulating that Emory would be responsible for patient care in return for VA facilities for teaching and research. A new facility for the VAMC opened its doors just east of campus in 1966.
Phinizy Calhoun Jr. per-formed the state’s first corneal transplant at Emory University Hospital.
Cardiologist J. Willis Hurst developed the first standard preparation of digitalis for children.

Also this year, members of the Emory faculty established the Private Diagnosticc Clinic to be closer to their patients at Emory University Hospital. This clinic was the forerunner to The Emory Clinic.
Also in 1949, Phinizy Calhoun Jr. helped establish an eye bank (the fifth ever established in the United States) to serve patients in the Southeast needing cornea transplants.)
Emory heart surgeon Osler Abbott performed the first intracardiac operation in the Southeast for mitral valve stenosis. (This was not yet “open heart” surgery, since the heart-lung machine was not available until 1955.)

This same year, Richard Blumberg became Emory’s longest-serving chair of pediatrics to date, retiring in 1981.
The Woodruff Memorial Research Building, named for Robert Woodruff’s father, was constructed on Emory’s campus.
The Emory Clinic was organized to enable physicians to maintain private practices while also teaching and doing research at Emory. Robert Woodruff funded the clinic, with the idea that the clinic would be self-sustaining and would make the medical school so as well.
Wesley Woods was founded to meet housing and health care needs of the elderly. The 64-acre complex adjacent to Emory’s campus includes the nation’s first freestanding geriatric hospital, which opened in 1987. The medical school’s relationship with Wesley Woods has helped make Emory a hub for pioneering advances in geriatric care and research and in teaching geriatrics as a specialty.
Arthur Richardson became dean, serving till 1979. Under his watch, Emory’s reputation in teaching grew by leaps and bounds.
J.D. Martin became chair of surgery, serving till 1971. He integrated the disparate surgical residency programs at Grady and Emory hospitals and the VA Medical Center, to bring them together as one unified program.
J. Willis Hurst started a cardiac catheterization lab in a building annexed to Emory University Hospital and appointed Robert Franch to run it.

Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children (now) Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston) relocated to the Emory campus. It had opened originally in 1928 on Forest Avenue.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was built adjacent to Emory’s campus.

This same year, Emory University Hospital became one of eight hospitals in the nation to establish an extensive clinical research facility with the aid of grants from the US Public Health Service.
   
Timeline continued on All Heart
     
     This marriage between Grady Memorial Hospital and the Emory School of Medicine is a bit like the betrothal of two opposites: the groom, an urban hospital for the poor; the bride, an up-and-coming medical school relocating to the suburbs. But like many wedded couples, this opposite attraction has forged a strong relationship that brings today’s cutting-edge teaching and research medical school together with a patient-centered and socially conscious bulwark. As noted in a 1938 Grady annual and still true, “The salient point is that every advance carried forward the development of both.”
     Atlanta’s first doctor arrived in 1846. By 1854, six years before Abraham Lincoln took office, enough doctors flowed into Atlanta to form Atlanta Medical College (AMC), the early ancestor of Emory School of Medicine (SOM). In 1855, the cornerstone for the AMC was laid at the intersection of Butler (now Jesse Hill Jr.) and Jenkins (now Armstrong) streets, the site of the recently opened clinical training and faculty building in the heart of the Grady campus.

     The first 40 years of medical education in Atlanta existed without a dedicated hospital. At the time, medical schools did not require hospital study before granting a degree, and students graduated without ever seeing a patient. Eventually, as the curriculum expanded to require hospital experience, Emory’s need for a location to train students grew.
     Grady Hospital was just such a place. Built as a memorial to Atlanta’s Henry Grady, it opened in 1892 as a 100-bed hospital dedicated to caring for the indigent of the South.
     Several medical schools opened, merged, and closed during these years of rapid growth in Atlanta. AMC split and merged twice during its first six decades, but in 1915, it transferred its holding to Emory University. By 1917, Emory had added anatomy, physiology, and chemistry buildings to its Druid Hills campus—then in the far northeast corner of the city. Emory freshman and sophomore medical students moved from the Grady campus to Druid Hills, while junior and senior students remained downtown. The union of the SOM and Grady was official. They were engaged.
     After only two years, the 1917 planning committee suggested that Emory could not flourish as a divided campus. They wanted the center of medical education to be either in Druid Hills or at Grady.
     “A medical college without a college-controlled hospital is like a chemistry department without a laboratory,” reported Dean Elkin to Bishop W.A. Candler, Emory’s chancellor, on April 30, 1917. “The interns at the Grady hospital are under the control of the city and not under the control of the college, and are not interested in the students at all.” He felt the city-controlled hospital was not a good place to teach Emory students.
Emory leaders believed a hospital under their own control would remedy the situation. Wesley Memorial Hospital, in downtown Atlanta, relocated to the Druid Hills campus, upon the urging of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler. This facility became Emory University Hospital, where Drs. Cyrus Strickler and Stewart Roberts rose to fame. However, the move wasn’t successful at first because Atlantans chose not to travel so far outside the city for admission to the hospital. The students rarely rotated through the struggling facility. The patients, after all, were at Grady.
     Downtown continued to be the preferred training locale for Emory’s junior and senior medical students. Strickler taught students at Grady and was the first to use bedside teaching for Emory students, becoming one of the many physicians to make the trek between the divided campuses. Despite the two locations, students knew their training was at Grady, and that’s where they wanted it.
     Abe Velkoff, an obstetrician who still frequents Grady, was a medical student at Emory in the 1940s. His final two years of training were based solely at Grady, and during his GYN/OB residency at Grady, he lived in the original hospital building and worked at a facility that stood where the current MRI center is today. “Training at Grady for me was the best training you could get,” he says.
     Velkoff trained in the white ward of Grady, for Grady was no exception in the segregated South. Across the street, the SOM building served as the hospital for black patients. Emory leased the facility to Grady for $1 a year. Starting in 1921, Emory ran the black hospital, called the Emory Division of Grady Memorial Hospital. This also was the year that the first Emory resident started. Prior to that, the house staff were hired by Grady.
      The hospital for black patients had Emory’s full attention. Even though a hospital sprouted at the main campus, the focus of clinical education maintained at Grady. By court mandate, the medical students did not dare enter the white hospital. Interestingly, as students began to teem at the Emory Division of Grady, none would be seen at the white hospital across the street until 1931. This change marked the beginning of the complete unification of Grady facilities with Emory.
     As far back as 1919, the NAACP in Atlanta protested Grady’s lack of black doctors. Emory also was criticized for the lack of black medical students and house staff and was urged to integrate. But it wasn’t until 1962 that Emory accepted its first black medical student, Hamilton Holmes. The first black intern came the following year. Grady itself integrated in 1965, as did other hospitals in Atlanta.


     When the Georgia Legislature created the Fulton/DeKalb Hospital Authority (FDHA) in 1941, it hastened a legal union between Grady and Emory. Replacing governance by the city, the counties took control of Grady. In 1946, just after World War II, Emory and Grady entered a contractual obligation that officially was sealed in 1951.
     Eugene Stead, who was recruited in 1942 as chair of the Department of Medicine, was surprised by the arrangement he found. While he was indeed the chair of medicine, he was not chief of the hospitals. Instead, two other people from the counties ran “the Gradys.” “I was going to live at Grady. I thought I would become the chief no matter what anybody else told me,” says Stead, who still has vivid stories to tell of those years. “And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.”
     The students and house staff flocked to this formidable teacher. Stead acquired a staff of unparalleled potential, created a rich environment of learning and teaching, and generated a large amount of formidable research. He catapulted Emory into greatness, according to longtime Grady nephrologist Elbert Tuttle. But what Stead feels was his most important contribution in his brief four years in Atlanta was a report to decide the fate of the relationship between Emory and Grady.


     The final recommendations of this report called for the development of the medical school on the Druid Hills campus while maintaining Grady as a teaching unit. Although several years would pass before any action would be put in motion, the report firmly places the future of the medical school at the main campus.
     The end result of this planning report led to the formidable growth of Emory University Hospital, the development of The Emory Clinic, the strengthening of the Winship Cancer Center, and the commitment to research at the main campus. Grady still maintained its place as the heart of the clinical training, the soul of the Emory SOM.
     On February 18, 1956, Hughes Spalding, on the FDHA, “explored the issue of running Grady without Emory and found it impossible.”
     The long relationship of Emory and Grady is full of controversies, rich stories, strife, and remarkable advances. Formidable figures in medicine have come to both campuses: Eugene Stead, Paul Beeson, J. Willis Hurst, Bruce Logue, Nanette Wenger, Luella Klein, Harland Stone, Herbert Karp, Andre Nahmias, Asa Yancey, Dan Thompson, Richard Blumberg, J.D. Martin, and many more. These are the people, along with the FDHA, the Emory administration, and the current faculty, who keep the marriage going.
     Tracing the history of Grady and Emory lends the case for a union that depends on two institutions, each requiring the other partner to further the mission of continued excellence in teaching, research, and clinical work. The addition of the clinical training and faculty office building on the Grady campus, supported fully by Emory dollars, has recently reaffirmed the education of medical students and Emory’s commitment there. In 1892, a mere two people served as house staff at Grady. There were 50 who lived at Grady by 1936, with no full-time faculty members. Now hundreds of faculty members, 950 residents and fellows, and hundreds of students work
at least some time each year at Grady. More than 25% of Georgia’s medical work force trained in the halls of Grady at some point.
     The sponsored research dollars for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center totaled $300 million for 2002–2003. Many of these research dollars have found their way to the Grady campus, including the opening of the Grady Clinical Research Center in conjunction with Morehouse School of Medicine under the leadership of Juha Kokko.
     Additionally, Emory physicians provide millions of dollars of uncompensated care to Grady each year. In 1900, Emory physicians saw 2,400 patients annually at Grady. By 1937, the patient load had grown to 118,000. Today, an annual total of more than 800,000 outpatient visits and 35,000 inpatients annually require a dedicated staff of Emory and Morehouse physicians.
     The bonds of this marriage may last forever. Andy Agwunobi, the current CEO of Grady, maintains that this partnership will only strengthen over time. “We work together to help each other out,” he says. “I feel the partnership between Grady and Emory will become stronger than ever.”
     Personally, I hope we live through any strife and acknowledge the powerful role each has in the life of the other. Together, we unite art and science, research and patient care, and create an environment that advances the practice of medicine by stimulating the student, challenging the physician, curing the patient, and enriching the community forever after.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
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