Description
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Children's Center, established in 1889.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine consistently ranks among the top medical schools in the United States in terms of research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, and other factors.
History
Before his death in 1873, Baltimore financier and philanthropist Johns Hopkins appointed a 12-member board of trustees to carry out his vision for a university and hospital that would be linked to each other by a medical school, which was at the time a radical idea.
The Johns Hopkins University was established first, opening in 1876. Construction of the Johns Hopkins Hospital began in 1877 with the razing of the site formerly occupied by the city's mental asylum, and took twelve years to complete. By the time the hospital opened in 1889, only six of the original twelve trustees appointed by Hopkins were still alive. Despite having already recruited the necessary faculty, the board no longer had enough funds to establish the medical school.
Four of the original trustee's daughters, led by Mary Elizabeth Garrett, spearhead a nationwide fundraising campaign to secure funding for the medical school. The campaign was stipulated on the condition that the remaining trustees agree to open the medical school to both men and women, as women were generally excluded from medical education in the 1890s. When the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine officially opened its doors in 1893, there were three women in its first class.
The founding physicians of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, sometimes referred to as the "Big Four", were pathologist William Henry Welch (1850–1934), the first dean of the school and a mentor to generations of research scientists, Canadian internist William Osler (1849–1919), who was perhaps the most influential physician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the author of The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), surgeon William Stewart Halsted (1852–1922), who revolutionized surgery by insisting on subtle skill and technique and strict adherence to aseptic technique, and gynecological surgeon Howard Atwood Kelly (1858–1943), credited with establishing gynecology as a specialty and being among the first to use radium in the treatment of cancer.
