Early X-rays, Missing Skulls and Frozen Pizza
The 200-year history of the Dartmouth Medical School has had its ups and downs.
1782
Harvard opens the nation's first medical department. The department has three professors.
1796
Dr. Nathan Smith asks the Trustees for permission to found a "Professorship of the theory and practice of medicine." The Trustees vote to defer consideration.
1797
Nathan Smith begins his medical lectures.
1798
Nearly a year after Nathan Smith starts teaching, the Trustees vote to start a medical school. Nathan Smith is the only professor.
1798
Joseph Gallup, having practiced medicine for eight years before enrolling in medical school, becomes the first graduate of Dartmouth Medical School.
1801
Daniel Webster's Commencement speech, "Recent Discoveries in Chemistry," is based on material gleaned from Nathan Smith's lectures
1803
The state of New Hampshire grants the medical school $600 for equipment.
EARLY 1800s
Isolated from corpse-rich Boston, the Medical School suffers a dearth of cadavers. One student, E.D. Cushing 1811, is indicted by a grand jury am fined $25 for "raising the dead." I
1808
"Such a motley collection I am sure I never set eye on before," is how one Dartmouth medical student (and Yale graduate) describes his fellows.
1809
The state legislature grants Dartmouth $3,450 to construct a medical building. Granite State lawmakers drive a hard bargain, stipulating that Smith match the grant with a donation of land, equipment, and his medical museum.
1810
Cyrus Perkins 1800, DMS 1802, becomes the Medical School's second fulltime professor. Perkins later supports New Hampshire's takeover of the College. He resigns after the Supreme Court settles the dispute in favor of Dartmouth.
1816
Nathan Smith leaves the College because of New Hampshire politics. His feelings for New Hampshire are not warm, as the state only grudgingly repays him the money he personally loaned the Medical School. In addition, he finds new state laws concerning dissection problematic.
1820
Dartmouth Trustees increase the size of the Medical School faculty to four.
1820
Honorary DMS grad Lyman Spalding publishes the nation's first pharmacopoeia. The work lasts as the standard reference well into the next century. Spalding, however, does not live to see his success. Shortly after the book's publication he is hit on the head by a box of garbage tossed from the second floor of a New York building and dies from his injury.
1838
During his two-year stint on the DMS faculty, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pioneers the use of the stethoscope as a diagnostic tool. He also designs a lightweight microscope that can be passed around the classroom for demonstrations. (It is now in the Harvard Medical School Museum.)
1839
Samuel McGill, graduating with honors, becomes the first African American to earn a diploma from the Medical School. McGill was sponsored by a Baltimore man involved in resettling former slaves in Liberia.
1840
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes prepares a skull for anatomy students. Numerous trap doors lead to interior sections. Paths of arteries and nerves are diagrammed in red and blue.
1848
In exchange for his medical diploma, Dr. William Carter is ordered by the DMS faculty to meet two conditions. First, he must disavow himself from "Dr. Carter's Compound Pulmonary Balsam," which he has been peddling for 50 cents a bottle. Then he has to give the faculty his secret formula.
1850
Having sent the Medical School a tiger's head and other museumquality curios, Dr. Otis R. Batchelder is awarded an honorary degree.
1852
Emily Blackwell, sister of the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, applies to Dartmouth Medical School. She is turned down. She attends Western Reserve Medical College and later founds the first school to train female doctors.
1882
The Dartmouth medical faculty drops the requirement for a thesis. Instead, degree candidates "make a qualitative analysis of urine."
1893
The operating room in the newly constructed Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital includes a 150-seat observation amphitheater. The special entrance for medical students is described "as one might envision the appearance of the entrance to heaven."
1895
Shortly after John Gifford accepts honors as valedictorian at the Medical School's Commencement, he and fellow student Jack McDonnell 1898 are arrested and charged with robbing the grave of a suicide victim in Norwich. Both plead guilty in Windsor County Court and are fined $2,000.
1896
The nation's first diagnostic X-ray is made in Dartmouth's physics lab by Medical School professor Gilman Frost 1886 and his brother, Edwin 1886, an astronomer.
1900
DMS is ranked in the first tier of the nation's 150 medical schools. The school, whose alumni consistently test high in exams, is recognized as a leader in medical training. .
1901
Dartmouth President William Jewett Tucker 1861 pressures the Medical School faculty to end the system of selling lecture tickets. Hereafter the faculty earns annual salaries and students pay tuition.
1905
College students with contagious diseases are treated by medical students at the Isolation Hospital. The so-called Pest House is later replaced by Dick's House.
1909
Dartmouth is one of only a few schools able to offer advanced methods of clinical instruction, thanks to its close relationship with Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. The downside to the curricular innovation: with such a small hospital there are not enough patients.
1910
The American Medical Association puts Dartmouth on notice. Writes the AMA, "owing to the extremely limited clinical and hospital facilities, we cannot list satisfactory the last two, or clinical, years of the course. On account of the limited population of Hanover we do not see how any satisfactory increase in such facilities can be obtained." Shortly after this report the New York Board of Regents refuses to license DMS graduates.
1913
The Trustees suspend the final two years of the clinical program and decide to concentrate on basic science. After two years, medical students must transfer to complete their training.
1914
The last six medical students receive their M.D degrees. From 1812 until 1914 the school granted 2,103 degrees.
1931
Med students, most of whom are smokers, can't light up in the dissection lab—not for reasons of health or safety—but because their hands are too dirty. They solve the problem by using hemostats to hold their smokes.
1941
The war pushes Dartmouth into high gear. The College and Medical School move to year-round, six-days-a-week operation. Some students earn their undergraduate and medical degrees in just over three years.
1942
Anatomy professor Rolf Syvertsen rushes to Boston in pursuit of a carload of inebriated med students attempting a mass enlistment into the armed forces.
1955
Bill Mosenthal '38 establishes the first intensivecare unit at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. Until this time no one had thought of putting a hospital's most serious cases near each other.
1956
DMS is placed on probation by the AMA Council on Medical Education. The AMA cites a lack of research by the faculty and disapproves of the fact that most of the medical students are Dartmouth graduates. Dr. S. Marsh Tenny '44, DMS '44, proposes a "refounding" of the Medical School, emphasizing that research and training for practice are compatible.
1957
The lead author of The ClinicalToxicology of Commercial Products, the so-called "bible of poison information," is Dr. Robert Gosselin, a DMS pharmacology professor.
1963
The New England Journal of Medicine publishes an article on Joseph Gallup, the first graduate of Dartmouth Medical School. The article notes that,"lt was Gallup's tragedy that he studied under two famous and excellent professors (Dartmouth's Nathan Smith and Philadelphia's Benjamin Rush) but adopted from their teachings for his own use only what was untenable, only what was ridiculous, only what was ephemeral." On the other hand, the recap of Gallup's career praises his methodology in studying epidemics. "Dartmouth does not need to be ashamed of her first graduate in medicine," concludes the journal, "even if no one would like to have been his patient."
1966
Medical students have trouble transferring to other schools to get their degrees. Plans are made to bring back the M.D. degree, in part because Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital has grown from 40 beds in 1910 into a 400-bed health-care center drawing from a regional population of 300,000.
1973
For the first time in 59 years DMS awards the M.D. degree. Eighteen students get their diplomas.
1982
The nation's first model curriculum to integrate alcoholism and alcohol-related issues is started at the Dartmouth Medical School.
1984
John McPhee publishes a 37-page article on rural family practices in The New Yorker. The primary characters in the story completed their medical training in the Maine-Dartmouth Family Practice Residency.
1984
In a speech at the Dartmouth Medical School, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop '37 calls for a "smokefree" society in public places by the year 2000.
1985
Researchers at DMS find a link between bedwetting and sleep apnea in children.
1985
DMS researchers build the first device for measuring the reaction time of the human brain.
1985
Researchers at the Medical School and the Thayer School develop a stereotactic system that precisely guides surgeons to brain tumors. In the first mock operation, the computer places the tumor somewhere on the second floor of Baker Library
1986
Researchers from Harvard and Dartmouth determine that X-rays are responsible for 250 cases of leukemia and 800 cases of breast cancer each year.
1986
Med student Ellie Pitts DMS '88 publishes an article in The NewEngland Journalof Medicine concluding that while canned cat food isn't recommended for humans, it does contain plenty of essential nutrients.
1987/88
New Hampshire awards Dartmouth Medical School a five-year, $10.5- million contract to run the state hospital. It is the first time that a private college will provide all clinical services and oversee the medical care at a state mental health hospital.
1987
The Medical School accounts for more than two- thirds of the $30 million the College receives in research grants.
1990
"The public doesn't want to see their doctors as some sort of robot," says Medical School associate dean Dr. Joseph O'Donnell DMS '71, explaining why Dartmouth has received a $335,000 grant to teach medical humanities.
1990
Beta carotene, the nutrient found in carrots, does not prevent skin cancer, says a DMS researcher.
1991
DMS, led by Dr. Jack Wennberg, is at the forefront of one of the hottest fields in medicine—outcomes research. The field has one basic premise: Although America spends $700 billion annually on health care, physicians have only a vague notion of whether much of it does any real good.
1996
Dartmouth researchers conclude that, "In northern New England there's a ten times greater likelihood of being injured by hitting a moose than by hitting a deer."
1996
More women, 43, than men, 41, enter DMS.
1997
The staff of Dartmou th Medicine magazine searches unsuccessfully for the missing "Holmes skull." Although the Medical School still has the skull of an infant that Holmes prepared, the adult skull from 1840 was probably trashed when the original school building was razed in 1963.
1997
Jay Buckey, an associate professor at DMS, is named "payload specialist" for the space shuttle Columbia.
1997
The Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid, runs a story reporting that research done at Dartmouth shows that "Frozen pizza really IS nature's perfect food." Officials at the College and Medical School deny knowledge of any work on campus involving frozen pizza.
1997
DMS professor John Baron investigates whether nicotine might help people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. The drug has potential, says Baron, but"the evidence is clear that smoking is a disaster."
