Organizational Milestones

1767

King’s College establishes the second medical school in the 13 Colonies

1770

King’s College awards first MD degree in the 13 Colonies (to Robert Tucker)

1807

A rival medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, is founded by a charter from the New York State Board of Regents

1814

After years of decline, Columbia’s medical school faculty join the College of Physician and Surgeons on Barclay Street near City Hall

1884

William Henry Vanderbilt donates land on 59th Street, between Ninth and 10th avenues, and $300,000 for a new P&S building, a record-setting gift to a medical school

1888

P&S extends the course of study to three years (it was extended to four years in 1894)

1891

P&S and Columbia medical school fully merge

1894

Nobel Peace Laureate John R. Mott founds what would become the P&S Club, the most comprehensive student activities organization in American medical education

1908

George Crocker donates $50,000 to P&S for cancer research, inaugurating a formal study of the disease at Columbia

1917

P&S admits it first women students, thanks to the efforts of Gulli Lindh Muller, a Barnard College graduate

1922

Edward S. Harkness and his mother, Mrs. Stephen Harkness, donate 22 acres in Washington Heights to Columbia and Presbyterian Hospital as a site for a new medical center

1928

The new $25 million Medical Centre—the “largest and most modern in the world”—opens after an Oct. 12 dedication

1931

Bard Hall, the first P&S dormitory, opens

1947

Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., becomes the first P&S teaching affiliate outside New York City

1967

P&S celebrates its bicentennial with a three-day symposium on genetics and development with participants that included Nobelists Watson and Crick and other Nobel Prize winners

1986

Lucille Shapiro, PhD, becomes the first woman to chair a P&S department. She was recruited from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she chaired molecular biology, to be chair of microbiology at P&S.

1993

The White Coat Ceremony, the first of its kind in the United States, welcomes incoming P&S students to the medical profession

2000

Columbia Trustees approve making the nursing and public health schools separate faculties from the medical school (the dental faculty separated from the Faculty of Medicine in 1959)

2003

Columbia’s four health sciences schools and the biomedical sciences programs of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are united under a new name, Columbia University Medical Center

2016

The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center is dedicated