Herbert E. Smith, Dean of the Medical School, 1885-1910

Herbert Eugene Smith was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1882. Upon graduation, he became instructor in chemistry at Yale and, three years later, he was promoted to professor of chemistry. He spent the year 1883 studying at the University of Heidelberg. Smith became dean in 1885 when Medical School was at it lowest ebb in both students and resources. The survival of the school was in question. Under his leadership, entrance requirements were tightened, the course of study lengthened and the curriculum expanded, and a beginning was made to achieve a closer connection to the New Haven Hospital. After twenty-five years ofservice as dean, Smith was moved aside in 1910 in the wake of the Flexner Report, to be replaced by George Blumer.

Yearbook, 1908, Showing Medical Hall

Medical Hall at 150 York Street had been the home of the Medical School since 1860. The building, torn down in 1957, was at the approximate location of the Chapel-York Garage.

Student yearbooks were published for many, but not all, years of the first decade of the 20th century. The last yearbook in this series dates from 1911. Possibly rising standards and smaller classes led to the demise of yearbooks until recent years.

Russell Chittenden, Professor of Physiology in the Medical School

Russell Henry Chittenden, Professor of Physiological Chemistry from 1882 to 1922, and Director of the Sheffield Scientific School from 1898 to 1922, was also appointed Professor of Physiology in the Medical School in 1900. He was born in New Haven, graduated from Yale in 1875, and after spending a year studying in Heidelberg, returned to Yale where he received his Ph.D. in physiological chemistry. A prolific and influential author, his research focused primarily on various aspects of the chemistry of digestion, particularly proteolytic processes, and the intermediate products and enzymes involved. He was one of the founding members of the American Physiological Society in 1887 and served as its third president. In 1906 he became the first president of the American Society for Biological Chemists.

In this 1903 group picture of Chittenden, his associates, and graduate students, Chittenden is in the front row, third from the left, and Lafayette B. Mendel, his successor, is to his right. Women were admitted to the Yale's Graduate School in 1893.

The New Dispensary Building on Cedar Street (Hope Building)

The Medical School had been affiliated with the New Haven Dispensary which it used for clinical teaching since 1879. In 1901 the Dispensary, formerly located next to the Medical School on York Street, moved to new quarters on the corner of Cedar and Congress Street. The building, still standing and known as the Hope Building, was constructed by Yale and funded by a bequest in memory of Jane Ellen Hope.

Department of Surgery Moves to Cedar Street

From 1908 to 1920 the Department of Surgery was housed in two dwellings at 321 and 323 Cedar Street. Joseph Marshall Flint was Professor of Surgery. The Yale Corporation purchased the block of land on Cedar Street across the street from the (then) entrance to the Hospital.

Medical Class of 1911, Freshman Year

As standards increased, there was a very large dropout rate among students in classes around 1911. Of 53 students who began the four-year program, only twenty graduated in 1911. The two black students in the photograph were among those who dropped out. After graduating African Americans early in its history, Yale graduated no blacks in medicine between 1903 and 1948. As the Medical School became more closely affiliated with the hospital and medical students did clinical clerkships, the school administration adopted the common racial prejudice that white patients would not want to be treated by black doctors or medical students. The most eminent member of the Class of 1911 was Samuel Clark Harvey, later Professor of Surgery at Yale.

Attempt to Hire Harvey Cushing, 1907

William Henry Welch recommended Harvey Cushing, then at Johns Hopkins, to succeed William Carmalt as Professor of Surgery at Yale. Cushing, a loyal Yale alumnus, considered Yale's offer seriously but declined it because the Medical School did not have adequate control of clinical facilities at New Haven Hospital.

Flexner Report on Yale, 1910

The Flexner Report of 1910 galvanized the Yale Corporation into taking seriously the need to raise funds to improve the Medical School. With the approval of the American Medical Association, Abraham Flexner, a college graduate of Johns Hopkins and an educator, undertook a muckraking investigation for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching of 155 medical schools in the United States and Canada. Medical reformers were convinced that there were too many schools of low quality producing an overabundance of doctors. Flexner's radical conclusion was that only 31 medical schools were fit to survive. His model of the medical school of the future was Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Yale, though it had serious problems in comparison, was among the schools that Flexner considered redeemable.

Abraham Flexner, Medical education in the United States and Canada; a report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

George Blumer, Dean of the Medical School, 1910-1920

After the Corporation considered the Flexner Report, Herbert E. Smith, dean for 25 years, was replaced by George Blumer. Blumer arrived in the United States from his native England in 1886 and received his M.D. from the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco in 1891. After his internship, he did graduate work in pathology and bacteriology at Johns Hopkins, where he worked under Halsted, Osler, and Welch. In 1906, Blumer, then on the faculty of Cooper Medical College, was called to Yale to become Professor of the Principles and Practice of Medicine. The decade of Blumer's service as Dean, 1910-1920, was a era of great change in medical education and Blumer has been credited with initiating the reforms which were to revolutionize medical education at Yale following the publication of the Flexner Report. In particular, he presided over the forming of an agreement with the hospital, the building of Brady Laboratory, the establishment of the full-time system, and the growth of endowment funds for the Medical School, and he envisioned the move of the Medical School to Cedar Street. After Blumer stepped down as Dean, he became the David Paige Smith Clinical Professor of Medicine until his retirement in 1940.