Med School Awarded $5.4 Million Grant

The Medical School has been awarded a $5,424,817 federal grant for construction of the James D. Vail Medical Sciences Building, a major component in the School's expanded program leading to the granting of the Doctor of Medicine degree.

Construction will start soon on the seven-story building which will double the space available for teaching and biomedical research. Architectural plans, the product of intensive study by the faculty, are already in hand.

The federal grant, awarded to Dartmouth on December 29 by the National Institutes of Health, complements $3.8 million in private gifts for new Medical School construction received during the Third Century Fund capital gifts campaign. One of the major gifts was made by Foster G. McGaw of Evanston, Ill., founder and chairman of the board of the American Hospital Supply Corporation, and his wife, Mary W. McGaw. The building is to be named in memory of the late James D. Vail '20, first husband of Mrs. McGaw and close friend of Mr. McGaw for many years. Mr. Vail was an official of the War Production Board at the time of his death in 1943.

President Kemeny welcomed the NIH grant as an important instance of a constructive partnership of the federal government, individual philanthropy, and a private institution of higher education working together to meet society's needs. The Medical School's new M.D. program could not have been realized, President Kemeny said, without the generosity of alumni and friends, the assistance of the government, and the vision and dedication of the Medical School faculty and staff.

The new facility is tentatively scheduled to open in mid-1973 by which time the conversion from a two-year basic medical sciences school to a three-year M.D. school will be nearly complete.

Dr. Carleton B. Chapman, dean of the Dartmouth Medical School, said in commenting on the NIH grant, "This significant support comes at a critical time. Dartmouth, addressing itself to the national health care crisis, is launching a program which we hope will provide viable solutions to shortening the training time and increasing the flow of physicians, lowering the cost of medical education, improving delivery of health care services, and alleviating the problems of rural poverty.

"The Vail building, by its very nature, will have a central role in this ambitious undertaking. Space planning for the building was done by academic areas, rather than along traditional departmental lines. The building can be reoriented internally without major remodeling whenever changes in medical education warrant. I feel confident in saying that it will be one of the most modern and best designed medical education structures in the western world."

The new building will house the departments of biochemistry, medicine, microbiology, pathology, pharmacology, physiology, and surgery, plus the animal research facilities, and will also contain an unusual auditorium-laboratory.

By the late 1970's the three M.D. classes will reach the projected total enrollment of nearly 200 students, an increase of about 80 per cent over present enrollment in the two-year program. In addition to M.D. degree candidates, the total will include a limited number of Ph.D. candidates taking advantage of Dartmouth's two-track course, one emphasizing medicine and the other biomedical research.

The clinical phase of the new M.D. program will center on the recently expanded Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, now a 450-bed regional referral and teaching hospital serving a primary area of 600,000 persons in New Hampshire and Vermont. The Veterans Administration hospital in White River Junction and smaller community hospitals in the Upper Connecticut River Valley comprise the other patient care resources.