Fig. 10 Anatomy class from the one-year life of the Louisville and Hospital Medical College.
Moreover, progressively increasing entrance requirements, longer school terms and additional years( three and then four) were required to achieve an M. D. degree, and matriculations begin to wane. This markedly increased competition and financial stress among schools, which had over-proliferated.
first floor contained the Dean’ s office and reception( southeast corner), faculty rooms, the chemical laboratory, the library and janitor’ s rooms. The second floor contained a two-story amphitheater( located where the current museum room sits, above the Chestnut Street entrance), which seated 600 students and claimed perfect acoustic properties. The second floor also contained an anatomic museum, chemical room, clinical room and professors’ rooms. The third floor contained the lecture rooms for the new sciences of histology, microscopy and bacteriology. The fourth floor contained the anatomy dissecting room under a skylight, with a tilting, tiled floor for washing, and another amphitheater for anatomy classes on the Chestnut Street side. It was“ perfectly ventilated by natural means” and claimed to be“ well-nigh odorless.” The following year( 1894) a dispensary( teaching clinic) was built in the same style immediate adjacent on 1 st Street( now the current Ronald McDonald House)( Fig. 8). It contained another two-story amphitheater for surgical demonstrations. There, surgical procedures improved from those of a few years earlier( Fig. 9A), demonstrated emerging practices of better anesthesia and more aseptic technique( Fig. 9B). The dispensary also had an“ etherizing” room, drug room, recovery room and reading room for students.
HARD CHALLENGES OVERWHELM A BRIGHT BEGINNING
The building immediately brought great pride to the faculty, as well as the Louisville community. However, severe financial challenges promptly arose. The panic of 1893 was created by depletion of US gold reserves to purchase silver, as required by the Sherman Silver Act. The four-year depression that followed severely threatened the financial stability of many institutions, including LMC.
Louisville was a perfect example of those dynamics, with five competing schools engaging in bitter public rivalry. This spilled over into the medical journals, city politics and newspapers of the time. At the turn of the century, pressure mounted for medical education reform locally and nationwide. In Kentucky, a committee of the State Medical Society was formed to facilitate merger of the Louisville schools. Also, Kentucky’ s J. N. McCormack, M. D., a crusading public health advocate had become a national figure. He created additional pressure for education reform and school reorganizations by urging stricter licensure laws. McCormack led a 1900 reorganization of the American Medical Association to strengthen its reputation and influence. In 1904, the strengthened AMA formed a Council on Medical Education, which aggressively pursued education reform through a national agenda of school inspections led by Council President, A. G. Bevan, M. D., and Executive Secretary Nathan Colwell, M. D. One of their first targets was Louisville, which Bevan described as“ one of five especially rotten spots.” These pressures caused Louisville’ s schools finally to consolidate. In 1907, LMC merged with the Hospital College of Medicine into the Louisville and Hospital Medical College( Fig. 10). Simultaneously, U of L merged with Kentucky University. The following year, these institutions joined with the Kentucky College of Medicine to form one school under the banner of the U of L Medical Department. The elegant LMC building, the largest and most modern facility, was chosen to house the re-structured school. Opening on November 18, 1908 with 700 students from the merged classes, U of L instantly became the largest medical school in the nation. Thus, the Louisville Medical College era came to an end, and a new chapter began for the historic Old Medical School Building, as the Medical Department of the University of Louisville.
This chapter will be told in the next article of this series.
Dr. Tobin is a professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. He practices with UofL Physicians-Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
FEBRUARY 2017 21