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For 150 years, Emory’s School of Medicine has defined
and redefined itself, overcoming obstacle after obstacle
and using the occasion to raise the bar yet higher. The school
endured struggles for sheer survival in its early days, followed
by heated disputes over priorities as competing agendas vied
for time and money.Today, the school is at a turning point—mature
and strong enough to recognize its potential, but also young
and bold enough to dare to set a whole new standard, and not
just for itself, but for medical education as a whole. The
school now is embarking on a new way of teaching, with new
tools, new precedents, and new investment of attention and
resources to prepare the next generation to transform medicine
for the 21st century.
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Breaking
free from the pack
In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a young high
school principal named Abraham Flexner to evaluate the medical
schools in this country. At the time, medical education bore
little resemblance to the well-regarded, science-based endeavor
we are familiar with today. Almost anyone who claimed some
medical training could start a medical school, and many did.
Most lacked an adequate relationship with hospitals or other
facilities where students could receive appropriate clinical
instruction, and many tended to expend more energy collecting
tuition than actually teaching students. Attendance standards
were minimal, and requirements for graduation varied widely
from school to school.
Unlike predecessors who had
undertaken previous evaluations of the state of medical education,
Flexner wasted little time on diplomacy. His now-famous Flexner
Report was scathing in its critique, lambasting the majority
of schools for shortcomings ranging from filthy conditions
to a glaring lack of student interaction with patients. One
now-extinct Atlanta school exemplified the problem, as Flexner
wrote, with its “indescribably foul” anatomy room
containing a single cadaver and a pathology lab made up of
a “few dirty slides and three ordinary microscopes.
. . . Nothing more disgraceful calling itself a medical school
can be found anywhere,” he said.
Of the four schools in Atlanta
at the time, however, the two that would become Emory’s
medical school fared better under Flexner’s scrutiny.
Both the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons and its
rival, the Atlanta School of Medicine, were cleaner and better
equipped than the other two schools, according to Flexner,
with the added bonus of access to “fairly abundant clinical
material” at Grady Memorial Hospital.
Flexner’s main advice
to medical schools was to align with a university or shut
down. In response to incentives offered by medical organizations
attempting to enforce Flexner’s recommendations, the
two “good” Atlanta medical schools put aside competition
and consolidated in 1913 under the name Atlanta Medical College.
The newly merged school was promptly rewarded for this act
with an “A” rating from the new accreditation
system of the Association of American Medical Colleges and
American Medical Association. In 1915, Atlanta Medical College
took the next logical step in its quest for stature and transferred
its holdings, about $22,000 in property near Grady Hospital,
to Emory University.
Emory’s founders, including
Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler, gave the medical school $250,000
for an endowment and began building two pink-marble, redtile-roof
laboratory buildings on its campus in Druid Hills. Dean W.
S. Elkin wanted a hospital on campus, and Candler arranged
for transfer of Wesley Memorial Hospital from downtown Atlanta.
What more could a dean want?
Having survived the Flexner Report and found a supportive
university home, Elkin believed the medical school now had
a chance to become the great teaching institution he and his
colleagues had hoped it could be. But when he turned his attention
to the bigger playing field, he clearly saw some catching
up to do.
“Within a short night’s
ride of Atlanta. . .” he wrote, “Vanderbilt [medical
school] has $8 million for a modern hospital, laboratories,
and endowment.”
Claiming
a clinical turf
What Emory lacked in elaborate laboratories and study facilities,
it made up for in providing its students the essential experience
of hands-on patient care.
“Ward walks” at
Grady had been one of the competitive edges Emory’s
predecessor schools had offered prospective students, and
the new school intensified its presence there. By 1921, Emory
was responsible for Grady’s African-American patients,
although state law still forbade students to go near the white
patients in the segregated facility. It would be another 10
years before students gained access to these patients as well.
But by 1925, medical students
also were being assigned to the on-campus Wesley Memorial
Hospital—an easily negotiated arrangement since the
medical dean was also the hospital superintendent. In the
1940s, the school assumed responsibility for patients at Lawson
General Hospital, a forerunner of today’s VA Medical
Center. In the next decade, Crawford Long Hospital came under
the Emory wing. The addition of Egleston and Wesley Woods,
later yet, to the mix would spread Emory’s teaching
across the full spectrum of care, from pediatrics to geriatrics.
But for many of the faculty
and all of the students, the soul of Emory’s medical
school remained at Grady, where Emory’s reputation was
built as a place to learn patient care. When a 1946 university
strategic plan predicted increased growth of the medical campus
at Emory, some were wary.
Faculty watched closely, with
measuring eye, the dispersion of resources and respect between
the two campuses, Emory and Grady. Whatever Grady’s
endemic financial problems as a public hospital, most faculty
believed they were more than outweighed by the educational
opportunities it provided and by their own personal commitment
to Grady patients. As would be demonstrated some decades later,
any dean who failed to take this commitment into account would
be taken aback at the opposition he met. |
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Time
out! You can't teach without faculty
“Abundant clinical material” aside, Emory struggled
mightily for decades to provide the essentials one normally
expects from a medical school—particularly, a paid clinical
faculty. By 1940, the medical school still continued to rely
on the largely volunteer efforts of local doctors who managed
to carve out time from their practices to teach students at
Grady. One administrator wrote, “The first thing the
physicians do is serve the patients, and teaching seems to
be secondary.”
But paying faculty cost a lot
of money, and better teaching meant bigger budgets. In 1942,
the school hired Eugene Stead to chair the Department of Medicine
at an astonishing annual salary of $8,000. With this and other
such hirings, the red ink began to flow.
By 1945, the annual budget,
only $100,000 just 20 years earlier, had grown to $390,000,
while income from tuition and the endowment covered less than
half of that.
At Grady meanwhile, physicians
were already providing well over $1 million in uncompensated
care annually, requiring salary support from the medical school
as well as funds to support program growth.
“I don’t know what
we can do about medical school costs,” wrote university
leader Robert Mizell to a trustee at the time. “I don’t
see how we can go ahead, yet I know we can’t afford
to turn back.”
People began to wonder aloud
if Emory could even afford to keep its medical school. And
some seemed eager to see it close. While medical faculty,
and even some donors, complained that the university paid
too little attention to medicine, other schools in the university
protested that the administration favored the medical school
over them. Why should medicine get all that help? More than
one medical dean countered that no other part of the university
was expected to do what medicine did: What if the business
school was asked to prepare the next generation of business
professionals with few salaried faculty while actually doing
a third of all the business in Atlanta and taking responsibility
for virtually all the research going on in the city?
But just as the crisis reached
its climax, an unprecedented event occurred. What saved the
day for the medical school, the university, and indirectly,
the city of Atlanta, was kindness mixed with vision—and
certainly not that of a stranger. |
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A
champion appears
Robert Woodruff, the legendary Coca-Cola leader, wanted Atlanta
to have a strong medical complex, and he knew that meant a
strong medical school. In the mid-1940s he took on the school’s
deficit himself, covering annual losses as high as $400,000
and sustaining this support for the next several years till
a solution could be found.
Most important, Woodruff made
it possible for the medical school to find a way to help itself.
With Woodruff’s support and backing, physician faculty
formed a medical practice plan, The Emory Clinic, whose profits
not only would erase the school’s deficits but give
it financial autonomy and position it to grow in ways previously
unimagined.
The plan worked as follows:
Faculty would teach at least one day a week and on the other
days work in the clinic, where they would earn their own salaries,
cover operational costs, and contribute money to the medical
school to support additional programs. The clinical structure
allowed the medical school to recruit the growing number of
specialists and subspecialists increasingly needed for state-of-the-art
patient care.
Sitting
out the game
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new game emerged, and
many medical schools rushed to play. As Emory focused on solidifying
its financial foothold and cementing its reputation in teaching
and patient care, the newly formed National Institutes of
Health was pouring out Cold War–era research dollars
on willing institutions.
It was a heady time for research,
but Emory held back. While other schools built up their research
programs, Dean Arthur Richardson and his longstanding department
chairs—picked because they were either great teachers
or great clinicians—continued to expand what they considered
the medical school’s primary missions: teaching students
and taking care of patients.
Not until the mid-1960s did
Richardson and others even begin to talk about building more
research labs and recruiting research-oriented faculty. When
he retired in 1979, he admitted that the school’s research
record was not as great as it ought to be.
But that record was about to
change. That same year a miracle occurred, the likes of which
had never been seen in academia.
Again, Robert Woodruff, patron
saint of the medical school, came to the rescue by turning
over $105 million from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation.
The largest single gift ever given to a university in the
country at the time, this money catapulted Emory overnight
into the South’s most well-funded private university
and one of the best-funded universities anywhere in the country.
Emory was determined to make the most of this unbelievable
opportunity. |
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Getting
with the program
Richardson’s 23 years as dean (1956–1979) had
marked the longest run of any medical dean anywhere in the
country. During the next 23 years, the medical school would
have five different deans, counting the current dean, Thomas
Lawley. Strikingly different in personalities and interests,
all shared an intense ambition for the medical school to break
into the top 10 research schools in the nation. This would
require rapid, consistent growth. Many schools had been investing
in their research programs for 50, 75, even 100 years.
James Glenn, who had built a
small urology program at Duke into a large section and had
been successful at fund-raising from alumni and grateful patients,
was recruited to replace Richardson. He hit the ground running.
Several of the previous generation of department chairs retired
with the former dean, and they promptly were replaced with
people primed to bring in research funding. The school’s
grant base quadrupled, from $10 million to $40 million. When
Glenn resigned in 1983, there was no question that the new
dean had to be someone who appreciated research.
So Emory headed straight to
the research well, wooing Richard Krause, then director of
the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases. Intrigued with Emory’s potential, its born-again
research ambition, and the fact that a new research building
was in the works, Krause signed on.
Dedicated in 1990, the Rollins
Research Center not only doubled the amount of research space
across campus, it also created a new pattern of interaction
between the medical school and university. The building, made
possible by a gift from businessman O. Wayne Rollins, was
to be shared by researchers from both sides of campus to create
synergy—it was hoped—among different fields of
expertise.
Today, it is hard to fathom
the anxiety created by planning for this new building—leaders
of other parts of the university argued for placement of the
center on “their” side of campus to prevent their
students from having to walk to the far hinterlands of the
medical side. And the financial officer turned pale upon learning
what a bridge over the railroad tracks would cost. But Emory
President James Laney overrode those concerns, and the Rollins
Research Center went up across from the medical library, within
a good stone’s throw of the entrance to Lullwater. Finally,
the university and medical school were beginning to look like
a research institution.
As more of the old guard chairs
began to retire or move to other responsibilities, Krause,
like his predecessor, recruited in the new research mode.
To chair the huge Department of Medicine, for example, he
brought in well-known nephrology researcher Juha Kokko, who
himself recruited numerous research-oriented administrators
and faculty. The needle on the dial in NIH funding climbed
higher. |
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Rumblings
of discontent
But beneath the heady research clamor, the first stirrings
of discontent began to emerge. Some faculty were concerned
that the effort to expand research was eclipsing the mission
to teach future doctors and provide patient care. And one
of Krause’s projects inadvertently added fuel to the
fire.
Charged with realigning the
balance at Emory of patient care, teaching, and research,
Krause perceived the clinical faculty’s time as being
so heavily committed to patient care, especially at Grady,
that they would never have time for research. He established
a faculty committee, headed by psychiatry chair Jeffrey Houpt,
to re-examine the school’s longstanding relationship
with the public hospital. The report came back: Emory would
never walk away from Grady Hospital.
This exercise damaged Krause’s
credibility with faculty. Frustrated, feeling cut out of major
decisions (such as the one to move epidemiology out of the
medical school to create a new school of public health), Krause
began to discuss leaving. Charles Hatcher, former director
of the clinic and by then head of the Woodruff Health Sciences
Center (WHSC), called the president and said, “Jim,
why don’t we ‘grow’ a dean?” Houpt
was appointed as a kind of chief of staff to Krause. When
Krause asked to step down, Houpt was promoted from “deputy
dean” to the real thing.
Houpt, like his predecessors,
set about to fill the medical school’s research plate,
recruiting powerful chairs and overseeing a $50 million renovation
of the 1950s-era Woodruff Memorial Research Building to add
more research space. Determined to keep propelling research
forward, he was also mindful of the danger in failing to keep
his eye on the ball in the school’s other missions.
Finally,
a full-out contest
When he arrived in the dean’s office, Houpt was well
aware of a need, for example, to ease the tension that had
built up between researchers and clinicians. As research had
become more and more important to the medical school, many
clinicians felt that they were no longer the favored siblings.
And the way they saw it, they were still expected to work
like crazy to support the children upon whom mom and dad now
smiled so lovingly.
Furthermore, they were now finding
it almost impossible to advance into tenured positions. When
the chair of a promotion committee told Hatcher, for example,
that a young surgeon had too few research credentials (meaning
NIH grants)
to be promoted, Hatcher exploded. “Don’t come
to The Emory Clinic when you get sick,” he said, “because
that surgeon won’t be there and we’ll have to
have you treated by the best damn dog researcher we have!”
To defuse the situation, Houpt
implemented a new plan for faculty promotion in which faculty
could choose between two tracks—research or clinical—under
which to be considered. Faculty on the clinical track would
be eligible for promotion to professor based on their clinical
research,
publications, and other contributions, but since their income
was covered by the clinic rather than the medical school,
this meant they would be ineligible for tenure. No one but
the chair and faculty member would know which track had been
chosen, and there were no differences in titles—a professor
was a professor.
The tenure issue bothered some
clinicians, who worried initially that the dual system was
a bait and switch. But when one of Emory’s most respected
tenured associate professors of surgery, Joseph Craver, voluntarily
asked to be considered for professorship on the clinical track,
thus giving up tenure, much of this suspicion ended.
As Houpt worked to improve relations
between the research and clinical siblings, research income
continued to climb. During his deanship, annual income grew
to almost $99 million. In 1995, Emory University finally gained
membership in the prestigious American Association of Universities
(AAU), one of the hallmarks of recognition in research standing.
Houpt says, “It was no coincidence that Emory University
got into the AAU after—and only after—the medical
school moved up 20 notches in NIH research rankings. It’s
not that the medical school is better than the other components
of the university, but it is the school that can generate
the big research dollars that influence those rankings. If
the English Department had its own NIH, then maybe they could
do it as well.”
Nine years later, Houpt, who
left Emory in 1996 and recently stepped down as medical dean
at the University of North Carolina, recalls how university
leadership always believed him when he told them the medical
school was great—but less so when he argued that it
could be so much greater with more resources.
“I think Emory has grown
into the idea of how much money it costs to be a great university,”
he says now. “It’s not cheap. It meant something,
and it sent a message, when they chose the medical dean from
Johns Hopkins [Michael M.E. Johns] as the new executive vice
president for health affairs. They knew he was going to want
to put Emory on a Hopkins level, and they were ready to step
up to the plate and help him do it.”
Ready
to go the distance
If the 1979 Woodruff gift had been a miracle for the entire
university, Michael Johns arrived to find a similar one, with
the same name, waiting for him during his first month here
in 1996.
The Woodruff Fund, a $295 million
gift of stock, would generate annual dividends to give him
enormous flexibility to grow programs across the health sciences.
His mandate? To make the WHSC, including the medical school,
compete with the best in the nation.
Johns’ first appointment,
made during his second month, was to name Thomas Lawley as
dean of the medical school. Lawley, the former chair of dermatology,
was already serving as acting dean. He had come to Emory from
the NIH and was known for his leadership prowess in research
as well as political savvy and plain likeability. He was chosen
from an array of people who came here from the best schools
in the country to be considered for the job because “they
had woken up to what was happening here at Emory,” says
Johns. Together, they would be a good team.
Johns’ first priority
when he arrived was to develop strategic plans in each mission
area. Out of necessity, his attention turned first to health
care, to getting Emory’s hospitals and clinic into shape
to face the looming threat posed by managed care.
He had been drawn to Emory in
part because of its integration of the hospitals with the
academic program, the lack of which he saw as one of Hopkins’
shortcomings. Johns led the consolidation of the clinic and
Emory Hospitals into one entity, Emory Healthcare, to come
under the administration of the health sciences center, with
access to bond ratings and benefits of philanthropy that only
the academy could confer. This would make the system stronger
and more nimble and efficient.
With the health system leaner
and better able to compete, the research arena was next on
the agenda. For some, a strong research program may represent
simply prestige and a ticket to federal funding largesse.
For both Johns and Lawley, articulating a vision for research
is a moral obligation, part of Emory’s contract with
society: Discovery is imperative to ensure better treatment
options for future generations, and innovations will come
out of the best schools and the newest sciences.
The research plan they put before
the trustees was a roadmap for what the medical school and
other components of the WHSC, working together, wanted to
achieve, why they thought they should and could do it, and
the resources that would make it possible. “We didn’t
ask for space,” says Johns. “We asked to be able
to change the world. The space was simply a necessary step
in beginning to do that.”
The trustees—businessmen
to bishops—bought into the vision and the fact that
it could not be done on the cheap.
The largest and most targeted
building plan in the university’s history began, much
of it focused on research. The WHSC’s research base
expanded from $141 million in 1997 to $329 million in 2004.
By far the largest component of this total, of course, with
more than $269 million in research funding in 2004, is in
the School of Medicine.
That leaves one mission to go. . . |
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A
new start for teaching
Some may find it ironic, and some poignant, that the last
of the School of Medicine’s missions to get a new-millennium
facelift is the one that mattered most to its founders: teaching.
“The research rocket is
launched,” says Lawley. As dedicated as he is to continuing
to boost the research trajectory, with a goal of top 10 status
by 2012, he says the time is right to focus full speed on
teaching. “We made some headway in our strategic plan
for teaching that we implemented in 1999, but we’ve
gotten as much mileage out of that as possible, and now it’s
time for a different vehicle.”
In some sense the strongest
tradition in Emory’s medical school, teaching also has
always been the most vulnerable, the first of the missions
to be set aside when time or money was short, out of the limelight
when patient care was king, still out when research ascended.
“But when all is said and done, it’s the core
mission that holds the other two together,” says Lawley.
“It’s the one that makes us different from a pure
research institution or private clinic, and it’s the
reason society holds medical schools to a different standard
as bastions of truth and learning.”
If teaching sets medical schools
apart, it now faces the need for profound changes to help
them fulfill their promise and obligation. Just as in 1910,
medicine is again undergoing a transformation of titanic proportions.
Scientists are just beginning to discover the complex ways
that genes affect disease processes and to propose novel ways
to prevent, treat, and even cure diseases once thought unstoppable.
But this new age of medicine poses new challenges, reshaping
old concepts and calling for a new direction in what students
learn in medical school and how they learn it.
Curricula in medical schools
all over the country are now in need of a Flexner-type revolution
once again, says Lawley. In many ways, they are still in thrall
to the first one—good enough for the 20th century but
inadequate for the 21st.
“Don’t misunderstand,”
he says of Emory. “We’re very good. Our students
are off the charts in their scores on board exams, and they
are highly sought after by every residency program in the
country. But we need different ways of measuring our success,
and we need to spend much more time and resources on teaching.”
What he has in mind is a revamped
curriculum that will harness and amplify the power of curiosity,
as opposed to dampening it with rote memorization of information
unintegrated with relevance to patients. Students will be
immersed more in sustained clinical experiences from day 1,
instead of the traditional order emphasizing basic science
in the beginning, followed by clinical training. Under the
new model, basic science will be assimilated based on its
relation to patient care, with more advanced science introduced
in the last two years. Lawley also wants students to have
more access to simulators and actors for honing procedural
and diagnostic skills and says they will spend less time—say,
two hours per day—in sit-in-your-seat lectures or taking
multiple-choice exams.
Some of the ideas being discussed
include eliminating or altering the old first-year rite of
passage of dissecting a cadaver. Instead of wielding the scalpel
themselves, students could watch “prosections”
performed by people who actually know how to do the cutting.
Surgeons could perform and discuss the prosections, connecting
the relevance of anatomic detail to specific surgical procedures.
MRIs and other images interpreted by radiologists could also
be used to teach anatomy in a way that is more meaningful
and relevant to the students’ experience. Students with
special need or interest in dissection expertise (such as
those planning to be surgeons) would be
able to take a traditional gross anatomy class in the fourth
year.
“Since students cover
some of the basic science material in undergraduate years,
we are discussing the idea of condensing the first two years
from 24 to 18 months to free up time in the second year for
self-learning, for students to explore their own interests
with faculty mentors, whether in a clinical specialty, research,
public health, or whatever,” Lawley explains. “We
want to
help them learn how to learn, so they can keep abreast of
changes in medicine and be effective and relevant in the coming
decades.”
Students will have more interaction
with faculty (a target of about four hours a day), and faculty
more interaction with one another in the coming years, he
says. Research and clinical stars may need—and will
receive—more targeted training in the art of teaching.
And crucial to the vision is that teaching will be given more
weight as a mission, with more protected faculty time devoted
to its practice.
A faculty steering committee
is in the process of ironing out the details of a plan to
implement this vision, which is due on Lawley’s desk
by August. Implementation is scheduled for the first-year
class in 2007.
Lawley believes so strongly
in the importance of this push forward in teaching that he
has put his own money where his mouth is, joining a growing
body known simply as the medical school’s “150
society,” people who have given or pledged $150,000
or more to a new building outfitted for cutting-edge medical
education. He hopes others will follow his lead.
“We’re aiming high,”
says Lawley, “but we’re also getting back to our
roots. We want ours to be a model of its own kind that a modern-day
Flexner would point to as an example for others to follow.”
Sylvia Wrobel is the former associate vice president for Health
Sciences Communications at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.
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At
the starting line . . .
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1854
The Georgia legislature grants a charter for the Atlanta Medical
College. Classes are held in Atlanta City Hall until a building
is erected in 1856. Col. L. P. Grant, the same man for whom
Grant Park is named, donates land for the new building on
the corner of Butler (now Jesse Hill Jr) and Jenkins (now
Armstrong) streets, with the provision that should the land
ever cease to be used for medical education, it will revert
to Grant’s estate.
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1857
John West-moreland, the first dean, runs for a seat in the
Georgia General Assembly, securing both a one-year term and
a $15,000 state grant to repay the construction debt for the
school building.
1866
Faculty member Thomas Powell persuades the Atlanta City Council
to donate $5,000 in city bonds to restore the school’s
building and equipment, which were all but destroyed during
the Civil War. However, a subsequent fight over use of his
money leads to a schism of its own and the creation of a rival
school, Southern Medical College, in 1878.
1892
Grady Memorial Hospital, a public facility founded to serve
the poor, opens its doors across the street from Atlanta Medical
College, expanding and continuing work started by the school,
which had begun providing free treatment for indigent patients.
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Teetering
at the brink. . .
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1898
The deans of both Atlanta and Southern medical colleges, W.
S. Elkin and W. S. Kendrick, agree to merge the two schools,
creating the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons, with
Kendrick as dean. But this union lasts just seven years, with
the dean leaving to start another rival program, the Atlanta
School of Medicine, in 1905.
1913
Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons
and Atlanta School of Medicine bury the hatchet again and
merge to form Atlanta Medical College, reprising the school’s
original 1854 name, this time with Elkin as dean. This second
merger was a direct result of the Flexner Report.
1857
Atlanta Medical College joins with Emory University to become
Emory University School of Medicine, expanding its presence
from Grady in 1917 to include two lab buildings on the Druid
Hills campus. This is made possible by the largesse of Coca-Cola
founder Asa Candler. Meanwhile, faculty and others contribute
to Emory’s medical school as their means allow. W. S.
Kendrick, dean of two predecessor schools, donates $5,000.
Dean W. S. Elkin makes several donations of $5,000 to $10,000
throughout his 10-year tenure to support projects he believes
important.
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A
higher goal . . . |
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1923
The university gives the school $35,000 for operating expenses.
This same year, faculty member F. Phinizy Calhoun gives $10,000
to the medical library, named for his father, A. W. Calhoun,
who was on the faculty of the original Atlanta Medical College.
in 1926, the Calhoun family gives another $32,000 to the library.
1931
Medical instruction, previously restricted to black patients
at the segregated Grady Hospital, is expanded to include all
Grady patients
1930s
Volunteer faculty members Edgar Paullin, Stewart Roberts,
and Cy Strickler help save Emory University Hospital from
financial ruin during the Great Depression by sending patients
to this facility.
1940s
An “anonymous” donor begins covering the growing
deficits as the medical school starts to hire salaried clinical
faculty. This donor later helps Emory create a clinic to support
the school.
1952
The school’s first research facility, the Woodruff Memorial
Research Building, is completed. It undergoes at least two
renovations and additions in ensuing years. |
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1953
With support from Robert Woodruff, The Emory Clinic is formed
for the purpose of supporting the medical school. Clinicians
practice medicine there four days and teach one day a week,
donating a portion of clinic revenues to support academic
expenses. Contributions from the clinic grow steadily, eventually
reaching some $20 million a year during the clinic’s
heyday. |
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1957
Creation of the clinic
exacer-bates the “two-cam-pus” concern between
faculty at Emory and Grady. Three chairs attempt a coup, circumventing
the medical school structure and cutting their own separate
deal to practice at Grady. The conflict inflames the Atlanta
medical community. With support from the university president,
the medical dean, Arthur Richardson, does some cutting of
his own— relieving these chairs of their duties. This
action and a full-page newspaper ad by President Goodrich
White, explaining the school’s side of the story, effectively
ends the brouhaha. Meanwhile, faculty such as J. Willis Hurst,
a founding member of the clinic and one of Grady’s strongest
supporters, demonstrate that it is possible to love and support
both campuses. |
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Higher
still. . . |
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1960
The U.S. Public Health Service selects Emory University Hospital
as the site for one of eight national clinical research centers.
Today, researchers and students have access to a second federally
funded center at Grady Hospital as well.
1964
Juha Kokko becomes the first person to receive a dual MD/PhD
degree from Emory. Kokko goes on to serve for 13 years as
chair of the Department of Medicine. Today, the dual-degree
program has more than 60 students. About this time, Willis
Hurst launches a continuing medical education program in cardiology,
attracting physicians from across the nation.
1973
William Patterson Timmie, manager of the Capital City Club,
bequeaths much of his estate to Emory, yielding $2.4 million
to establish professorships in medicine, basic science, and
chemistry. If Emory as an investment is good enough for his
friend Robert Woodruff, he says, it is good enough for him. |
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1979
Robert Woodruff and his brother George give approx-imately
$105 million from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation
to Emory University, the largest gift to an educational institution
in history, at the time. This gift, and funds from a capital
campaign launched that same year, support scholarships, professorships,
and other initiatives aimed at making Emory and its medical
school a major research center. |
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1980
About this time, the Harris Foundation, established by Reunette
Harris and her family, begins a series of donations to fund
the first of several endowed chairs as well as scholarships
and research initiatives. Gifts from the Harris estate,
later bequeathed to Emory, eventually total more than $21
million.
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