1901-1911: Prelude to a Transformation

1911-1921: The Deanship of George Blumer and the Beginnings of the Move to Cedar Street

1921-1931: Milton C. Winternitz and the "Boom Years" at Yale School of Medicine

1931-1941: The Institute of Human Relations and the Depression Years

1941-1951: War Service, War Research, and the Immediate Postwar Period

Cushing/Whitney Medical Library

Historical Library

Bibliography of
Secondary Sources
on the History of
Yale Medical School

 

1941-1951

Yale Medical School was actively engaged in World War II through organizing a unit for military hospital service and through numerous war research projects. The curriculum was temporarily altered to accelerate production of physicians for the war effort.

After the war, the Medical School, though it remained one of the top schools in the country, faced financial difficulty. In 1946, New Haven Hospital merged with Grace Hospital to form the Grace-New Haven Community Hospital. The University was subsidizing the deficit of the Medical School as well as making a substantial contribution each year to the Hospital to offset the costs of teaching. At this time only ward beds were used for teaching, and the rate for ward patients didn't cover the cost of their care. Federal research grants had begun to come in but the overhead on the early grants was much less than the actual costs to the University. This situation was soon to change with a new agreement with the Hospital and expanded federal support.

 

Francis Gilman Blake, Dean of the School of Medicine, 1941-47

Francis Gilman Blake graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1913. After completing his internship and residency at the Brigham Hospital in Boston, he spent a year at the Rockefeller Institute. In 1921, he came to Yale as John Slade Ely professor of medicine and, in 1927, he was appointed Sterling professor of medicine, a position he held until his death in 1952. Blake was a superb clinician with a broad knowledge of medicine and an astute diagnostic ability. Nationally recognized for his work on epidemic diseases, he directed some of the first clinical tests on penicillin and the sulfa drugs. Blake served as acting dean of the School of Medicine from 1940 to 1941 and as dean from 1941 to 1947. An effective and innovative administrator, he led the School of Medicine during the critical period of World War II. During his tenure, clinical clerkships were transferred from the fourth to the third year, a practice that was adopted by other leading medical schools; lectures were reduced to a minimum and medical students were encouraged to become independent thinkers. With James Trask, he developed the Division for the Investigation and Treatment of Infectious Diseases.

 

General Hospital 39, Yale military unit in World War II

This unit, consisting of physicians and nurses from the Medical School and the Yale School of Nursing, was assembled at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts and formed on July 12, 1942. The unit served at the New Zealand Army Hospital which treated the wounded from South Pacific battle zones.

During the war, the Medical School temporarily increased class size, admitted some students with two years of college, shortened the program leading to a degree to three years, and made the thesis requirement optional, all in an effort to increase the output of physicians.

 

Wartime Research

Numerous medical faculty made significant contributions to war-related research including John F. Fulton's studies of aviation medicine, John Paul's work on encephalitis, and the studies of Ashley Oughterson and Averill Liebow on the effects of radiation from the atomic bombs dropped in Japan. Of especial significance was the research on mustard gas by Yale pharmacologists Alfred Gilman and Louis Goodman and physician Gustav Lindskog. They discovered the use of nitrogen mustard to destroy tumors of cancer patients in 1942. This has been considered by many to be the beginning of cancer chemotherapy.

In addition, penicillin was first used in the U.S. at New Haven Hospital in 1942 to treat the life-threatening high fever of Ann Miller, the wife of Yale's athletic director Ogden Miller. The penicillin was procured from Florey's laboratory through the auspices of his friend John Fulton and administered by fourth-year medical student Rocko Fasanella, later chairman of the Section of Ophthalmology.

 

Cyril Norman Hugh Long. Dean of the School of Medicine, 1947-52

C.N.H. Long was born in England and educated as an organic chemist at the University of Manchester. He received his M.D. from McGill University in 1928. After serving as director of the George S. Cox Medical Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Long was appointed professor and chairman of the Department of Physiological Chemistry at Yale in 1936. His research over the next three decades centered around the effects of pituitary and adrenal extracts on the metabolism or carbohydrates, and he was recognized as one of the leading investigators of his generation in the field of endocrinology. As an administrator, he served as Director of the Division of Biological Sciences (1939-42), Dean of the School of Medicine (1947-52), and Chairman of the Department of Physiology (1951-64). During his tenure as dean, he led the school through the difficult period of adjustment following the end of World War II and the beginning of the period of expansion of academic medicine.

 

John Punnett Peters, John Slade Ely Professor of Medicine, 1927-1955

John Punnett Peters graduated from Yale in 1908 and received his M.D. degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1913. He served as a captain in France during World Was I. In 1921, he became associate professor of internal medicine at Yale and, in 1927, he was promoted to the John Slade Ely Professorship, a position he held until his death in 1955. Peters was noted for his work in the field of metabolism and he created a superb renal center at Grace-New Haven Community Hospital, ideal for clinical and laboratory research. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Known for his integrity and his concern for the over-all care of the patient, Peters was outspoken on the need for comprehensive medical coverage.

 

John Rodman Paul, Professor of Preventive Medicine, 1940-61

John Rodman Paul received his M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins in 1919 and served as director of the Ayer Clinical Laboratories of the Pennsylvania Hospital before joining the Department of Medicine in 1928. In 1940 he was promoted to Professor of Preventive Medicine. He made significant contributions to the study of infectious mononucleosis, hepatitis, and rheumatic fever, but he is especially noted for his work on poliomyelitis. With his close friend and collaborator James Trask, he established the Yale Poliomyelitis Study Unit and together they received the first research grant awarded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Paul and his colleagues in the Section of Preventive Medicine made many of the fundamental contributions to our understanding of poliomyelitis on which the subsequent immunization programs were based. He was one of 15 persons named to the Polio Hall of Fame established in Warm Springs in 1958. After his retirement in 1961, he was named director of the Yale Serum Bank.

The Department of Epidemiology will be more fully covered in a later exhibit on Epidemiology and Public Health and the Yale School of Nursing.

 

Edith B. Jackson and the Rooming-In Project, 1949

Edith B. Jackson received her M.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1921 and came to Yale in 1923 as an assistant in Pediatrics. She rose (slowly, as was typical of women's careers at the time) through the ranks to become Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry in 1949. In the 1930s she obtained training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. and in Vienna. On her return, she directed the Child Welfare Research Unit in the Department of Pediatrics. From 1949 on, she directed the pioneering Rooming-In Project at Grace-New Haven Community Hospital whereby mothers had the option of keeping their infants in their room instead of in the hospital nursery. The Project, in which a number of Rooming-In fellows participated, included contact with both parents during the prenatal period and follow-up. Jackson provided guidance as rooming-in spread all over the country. Associated with rooming-in at Grace-New Haven was "natural childbirth," promoted and studied by Herbert Thoms of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

 

Class of 1951

 

Yale's 250th Anniversary, 1951

The Medical Library exhibited for the occasion medical books from the 1742 Library, that is medical books that Yale had acquired before 1742.

 

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