University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine

The precursor to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine was founded as the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago, popularly called P&S, in 1881. Five physicians established the proprietary medical school by personally funding a building to house the first class of 100 students. The curriculum consisted solely of clinical training during the first 10 years. But beginning with the 1891 term, an innovative program shift resulted in training in the basic sciences as well. Medical schools flourished at the turn of the 20th century with 150 existing nationwide. P&S was one of 14 medical schools in Chicago. The large number of U.S. medical schools with inconsistent admission requirements and educational standards all contributed to an enormous excess of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners. In 1908, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching commissioned Abraham Flexner, an external reviewer, to study medical education in U.S. and Canadian medical schools. His findings, the 1910 Flexner Report, generated massive reforms in medical education that are still applied today. Flexner found P&S as one of only a handful of Chicago medical schools deemed salvageable. In 1913, after two decades of negotiations among P&S, University of Illinois officials, and state of Illinois legislators, the once proprietary medical school became the state's first college of medicine: the College of Medicine of the University of Illinois. A cooperative agreement in 1919 between the university and the Illinois Department of Public Welfare resulted in the construction of the Research and Educational Hospitals, including a psychiatric institute, a surgical institute for children, an institute for juvenile research, a clinical institute, and a new eye and ear infirmary. The university agreed to provide the facility with professional staff for teaching and research into the causes and prevention of disease. In 1931, the University of Illinois College of Medicine became one of the largest medical schools in the country. An entering class of 175 became the first in college history to attend classes in the new building at the current home of the college, 1853 West Polk Street (which is about two miles west of downtown Chicago). In the early 1970s, the state mandated regional sites in Peoria, Rockford, and Urbana-Champaign to provide health care for the state's underserved population. College wide, UIC now has the largest medical school in the country with a total enrollment of 1,300. Students pursue their medical school studies among the four educational sites. The aging Research and Educational Hospitals were the catalyst to build the University of Illinois Hospital in 1980. Current building projects include a new College of Medicine Research Building, with completion scheduled for April 2005. The new Magnet Resonance Imaging Center has been designed to accommodate the 9.4 Tesla magnet, the world's largest whole body magnet for medical imaging. For more information about the UIC College of Medicine, please visit 〈http://www.uic.edu/depts/mcam/index2.html〉. Carla Beecher-moehn Director of Communications The University of Illinois at ChicagoCollege of Medicine

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.