City of Medicine
In 1843, a student at the “med school of the University of Pennsylvania,” as he called it in a letter to a friend in Boston, declared Philadelphia “decidedly the city of the Union for doctors, the facilities for study making it a perfect little Paris.” The comparison reflected the renown of the French capital at that time for bedside teaching and anatomical dissection. By that point in the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia had become the country’s pre-eminent medical city, known particularly for its wealth of opportunity for medical education. Although the city lost its edge in the early 1900s, it recovered later in the century to become a growing center of health care, research, and education. Medical care and education remained integral factors in the social and economic fabric of the city.

In 1752 Pennsylvania Hospital received its first patients in rented quarters on Market Street. By 1804 it had completed the handsome set of structures now known as the Pine Street Building. Though long supported by many Quakers, the Hospital has always cared for all Philadelphians. It has as well continuously provided valued clinical instruction. (Photograph by Steven J. Peitzman)
Philadelphia gained its early reputation as a city of medicine through the development of hospitals and medical schools. The founding of Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 (America’s first general hospital) was an indication that by the mid-eighteenth century, Philadelphia had grown into a substantial urban complex with needs for services beyond what family and church could provide. Founded by physician Thomas Bond (1712-84) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), the nation’s first hospital joined a movement—rooted in Enlightenment thought, then underway in Britain—to create “voluntary hospitals” to care for “strangers” and the “worthy poor,” funded and conducted by private philanthropy. From the outset, the hospital contributed to the city’s allure in medical education. Its Wednesday and Saturday morning demonstration “clinics” drew crowds of nineteenth-century medical students.

The Southern Dispensary for the Medical Relief of the Poor opened in 1816 on then Shippen, now Bainbridge Street west of Third. The Renaissance Revival building still standing (318-320) dates from the 1858. Most row-house Philadelphians went to family doctors in their neighborhood (or the doctor came to them). Free dispensaries (clinics) served the poor and working poor; the Southern particularly cared for the immigrants of South Philadelphia. Young physicians and trainees valued the experience gained at such dispensaries. (Photograph by Steven J. Peitzman)
Numerous hospitals subsequently arose within neighborhoods and nearby townships, supported by religious denominations or particular segments of the citizenry, such as African Americans or women. The city opened Blockley Almshouse in 1732, which later became Philadelphia General Hospital; and the origins of the Municipal Hospital for Contagious and Infectious Diseases can be traced to before 1818. Specialty hospitals arose for care of the eyes, children, and maternity work. Reflecting the Quakers’ concern for those “deprived of reason,” Pennsylvania Hospital spawned a progressive Hospital for the Insane (1841) on then-rural grounds west of the city; a Friends Asylum (1817) was founded in the Frankford countryside. With other Quaker women, in 1862 pioneer woman doctor Ann Preston (1813-72) founded Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia to provide clinical training for women medical students and nurses. Temporary hospitals, some immense, were thrown up throughout the city to care for soldiers during the Civil War, the Satterlee in West Philadelphia being the best known. Eventually the city’s medical schools established their own hospitals.
The numerous hospitals served as objects of neighborhood pride and philanthropy, particularly service by women. In addition, their accident wards supported the city’s vast industrial growth in the nineteenth century.
Philadelphia’s place as a center of medical education can be traced to 1762 when William Shippen Jr. (1736-1808), son of a physician and educated in England and Edinburgh, initiated some lectures on anatomy and midwifery on Walnut Street near Third. Also a product of Edinburgh and European experience, the energetic John Morgan (1735-89) in 1765 proposed an enlightened plan for medical education, and with Shippen, inaugurated lectures at the College of Philadelphia intended as part of a course of study leading to a degree in medicine. From 1789 through 1791, both the revived College of Philadelphia and the newly chartered “University of the State of Pennsylvania” offered medical lectures, by feuding faculties (Philadelphia’s early teaching physicians were a notably feisty bunch). The factions united as the forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, America’s first. It won standing during the nineteenth century as one of the strongest in the nation, though strong in a stolid sort of way.
Perceiving room for another medical school in Philadelphia, if not an actual need, surgeon George McClellan (1796-1847) and some collaborators opened Jefferson Medical College in 1824. Both Penn and Jefferson welcomed huge classes, and so produced a high proportion of early American doctors. Jefferson’s faculty came to rival Penn’s in national reputation.

This posed photograph of the dissection laboratory of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) from the 1910 yearbook conveyed the reassuring idea that the study of medicine, even anatomy, could be orderly and lady-like. The opening of Quaker-supported WMCP in 1850 and founding of Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia (1861) made Philadelphia the home of many early women physicians and surgeons. (Legacy Center Archives, Drexel University College of Medicine)
Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, in Philadelphia (and elsewhere in the United States), the making of new medical colleges swelled into a kind of mania. Those after Penn and Jefferson that endured into the twentieth century included Hahnemann Medical College (1848); the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (1850; the first of its kind in the world); the Medico-Chirurgical College (1881); the Philadelphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine (1883); and the Philadelphia College and Infirmary of Osteopathy (1899). Other schools, ranging from fully creditable to entirely fraudulent, came and went. Extinct schools included (among many) the co-educational Penn Medical University (1853), which had nothing to do with William Penn and was surely not a university. Lastly, the Medical Department of Temple College, later Temple University School of Medicine, opened in 1901. The availability of strong medical education for women, and the presence of several women’s hospitals, fostered growth of a sizeable community of women physicians and surgeons who practiced and taught here. Hahnemann Medical College taught the therapeutic system of German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1745-1843) called homeopathy, which flourished in Philadelphia.
By 1890, about 2,000 names appeared in the city’s medical directories, for a population of approximately one million. Most were doctors in the neighborhoods—serviceable, often hard-working. They saw patients in their homes and during office hours, and some attended at a hospital. They looked after illnesses severe and trivial, delivered babies, vaccinated, repaired fractures and lacerations, gave advice; and, more or less successfully, made a living.

A fully expressed product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) became America’s fist internationally recognized physician, though a controversial one. His fervid belief in the arterial localization of disease led to intensive use of bleeding and calomel (mercurous chloride) during the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s. As doctor and citizen, Rush served the Revolution, advocated for abolition, embraced temperance, and offered ideas for the development of education in the new republic. (Engraving after painting by Thomas Sully, National Library of Medicine)
But it was the downtown physicians and surgeons, most with senior faculty positions at Penn or Jefferson, who built Philadelphia’s reputation as the nation’s medical capital. Among the early figures were Benjamin Rush (1749-1813), a reformer interested in everything, concerned with better care of the insane, and signer of the Declaration, recalled (unfortunately) for his ferocious use of mercury and bleeding for yellow fever; Philip Syng Physick (1768-1837), “father of American surgery”; and editor and ophthalmologist Isaac Hays (1796-1879). Later in the nineteenth century came anatomist and brilliant polymath Joseph Leidy (1823-91); master teacher of internal medicine Jacob Mendez Da Costa (1833-1900); physiologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, and popular novelist S. (Silas) Weir Mitchell (1829-1914); internationally known surgeons Samuel D. Gross (1805-84), and W.W. (William Williams) Keen (1837-32), the latter very much a progressive mind and a teacher at Woman’s Medical, Jefferson, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (anatomy). Gynecologists included Washington L. Atlee (1808-78), among the first to remove uterine fibroids, and Emeline Horton Cleveland (1829-78), one of the earliest women to perform abdominal surgery. Others gained repute through specialty practice centered on disorders of the eye, ear and throat, skin, nervous system, and mind. Active as well were oddballs and dissidents–followers of arcane sectarian systems, or the radical Quakers from Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties who upheld the right of women to study medicine.
![Progressive surgeon W[illiam] W[illiams] Keen (1837-1932), a graduate of Central High School, taught at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and later at his medical alma mater, Jefferson Medical College. He advocated laboratory research and accepted the germ theory. Keen also counts as a pioneer in neurological surgery and collaborated with S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) in studies of nerve injury acquired during the Civil War. He also taught anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (National Library of Medicine)](https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/WW-Keen-224x300.jpg)
Progressive surgeon W[illiam] W[illiams] Keen (1837-1932), a graduate of Central High School, taught at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and later at his medical alma mater, Jefferson Medical College. He advocated laboratory research and accepted the germ theory. Keen also counts as a pioneer in neurological surgery and collaborated with S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) in studies of nerve injury acquired during the Civil War. He also taught anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (National Library of Medicine)
Some Philadelphia doctors strayed well beyond medicine. In addition to the novelist S. Weir Mitchell, physician and pathologist William Pepper (1843-98) led the founding of the Free Library of Philadelphia and two museums. Philadelphia can claim two physicians who found fame as Arctic explorers—the erratically adventurous Elisha Kent Kane (1820-57) and Isaac Israel Hayes (1832-81). James E. Rhoads (1828-95) gave up an exhausting practice in Germantown for Quaker work in service to the freedman and Indian, and he later served as president of Bryn Mawr College.
It was not, of course, novels or Arctic ice that established the stature of Philadelphia doctors in the nineteenth century. What then? One can extrapolate from what the distinguished anatomist and historian George W. Corner (1889-1981) wrote about the senior faculty at Penn: “The University’s medical teachers had always been superb clinicians—masters of diagnosis and treatment and polished expositors.” That is, they brought comprehensive knowledge and experience to their practices and teaching (and many were broadly erudite beyond their professional expertise).
For most of the nineteenth century, medical practice drew upon the foundational sciences of anatomy and morbid anatomy (pathology, the study of structural change in organs caused by disease). Philadelphia’s skilled anatomists dissected, taught, and wrote books that added to the city’s reputation as a city of medicine. Several brought back the ideas and methods they had studied in Paris. The reputations of Philadelphia’s doctors spread through their participation in national organizations, consulting or teaching visits out of town, and the praise of their students. They benefited from Philadelphia’s centrality in medical publishing: its enormous production of medical books in the nineteenth century far exceeded that of New York or Boston. Philadelphia physicians readily fed the publishers’ demands for new textbooks and manuals (including homeopathic). For more than 100 years, the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, edited and published in Philadelphia, prevailed as the country’s leading such periodical.
In the early twentieth century, however, Philadelphia lost its edge. Significantly, the influence of Philadelphia’s American Journal of the Medial Sciences declined, while the New England Journal of Medicine, published in Boston, gained scriptural standing. Not only Boston but also New York and Baltimore challenged Philadelphia for medical leadership of the United States, and in some ways won. The destabilizing factor was experimental laboratory research—or, unhappily for the Quaker City, the paucity of it in the city’s medical colleges. The decisive factor was philanthropy—or the paucity of it for Philadelphia’s medical colleges.

Medical Hall (later Logan Hall, Claudia Cohen Hall) opened in 1874 soon after the University of Pennsylvania moved to its campus in West Philadelphia. A Gothic design by the professor of architecture Thomas Webb Richards (1836-1911), it is the oldest extant medical school structure in the city. (Photograph by Steven J. Peitzman)
By the 1880s and 1890s the center of advance in medical science had shifted from the hospital wards and autopsy rooms of Paris to the universities and laboratories of Germany. Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, the acceptance of microbes as the cause of many diseases leant enormous luster to the laboratory and its workers. Physiology, the study of function, seemed a promising field. A handful of young American medical graduates worked under German scientists in the 1880s and 1890s, then returned home to seek a place to do original laboratory research. The only likely locus in Philadelphia in this period was Penn, but it was not to be. One of these German-trained men, Simon Flexner (1863-1946), came to the university in 1899 but left in 1903, disappointed by the lack of interest and resources for investigation. He went to New York to head the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In a history of Penn’s medical school, George W. Corner wrote that in this period its leaders failed to recognize that “for a generation and more to come, the advance of medicine was going to depend on discoveries in biology and biochemistry that would rapidly alter the physician’s whole outlook.” Corner might have added physiology and bacteriology. It was indicative of local inertia that neither Jefferson nor Penn required course work in bacteriology until ten years after Robert Koch (1843-1910) in Germany announced the discovery of the microbe causing tuberculosis.
Aware of the need to move forward, progressive leaders at the Penn medical school in 1910 effected a reform program (really a coup), which promoted David Edsall (1869-1945), an alumnus and faculty member with sound credentials in both laboratory and clinical work. The insurrection displaced several senior professors and brought in promising researchers from outside the city. Regrettably, the “old guard” among faculty managed a counter-revolution: Edsall left Penn and soon guided the rise of Harvard University Medical School to pre-eminence.
Perhaps these events reflected the larger intellectual outlook of Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. Never as overtly concerned with pure knowledge as Bostonians, Philadelphians excelled in the realm of the useful and tangible: mechanical innovation and making things well, illustration and lithography, architecture and building, and the practice of medicine and surgery. Unlike at Harvard and Yale, at Penn the science, engineering, and medical schools occupied most of the space. Of course erudition and scholarship could be easily found in the city, but for the most part, the practical prevailed. The leading nineteenth-century physicians and surgeons of Philadelphia did publish a great deal that was new—careful anatomical and pathological observations, discerning descriptions of diseases, novel procedures and remedies. But animal experimentation in the laboratory seemed foreign.
As medical science advanced in Boston under Edsall, several accidents of philanthropy favored the ascent of Baltimore and New York City as national centers of medical education and research. In the nineteenth century, Americans saw medicine as practical work and a source of livelihood and thus not as an object of charitable support. Neither government nor individuals subsidized medical research. Few Philadelphians made donations to the city’s medical schools. (A modest exception was the Woman’s Medical College, embraced by its Quaker friends.) Nor did this usually occur elsewhere. But in Baltimore, Quaker businessman Johns Hopkins unexpectedly bequeathed his immense fortune to the founding of a hospital and a university. The early trustees chose to build the university on the German research model, including a medical school linked to the hospital. The Johns Hopkins Medical School opened in 1893—with former Philadelphian William Osler (1849-1919) as one of its prized founding faculty.
In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, founded in 1905, in conjunction with the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association, engaged educator Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), Simon’s brother, to carry out an inspection of North American medical schools. Flexner’s famous report of 1910, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, furthered a process already underway to raise standards and close marginal, or worse, schools. Subsequently, Flexner directed the distribution of grants from the Rockefeller General Education Board to the stronger schools. Dogmatic and sometimes arrogant, Flexner insisted on the “full-time plan” (essentially, that medical school teachers be on salary, not mainly in private practice); nurturing of research; and assured access to hospital teaching beds. His vision also demanded a continued reduction in the number of medical schools in the United States, with no more than one school, fully part of a university, in each metropolis.
Neither “full-time” for clinical faculty nor the giving up of schools much appealed to medical Philadelphia, where at each older institution a distinct personality and heritage had evolved, upheld by alumni, faculty, and even students. For a time, however, Penn and Jefferson diligently worked towards a merger, or at least an awkward sort of coupling that would perhaps look like a merger to Flexner, but still preserve individual identities. The press touted the plan: “Philadelphia is now in a fair way to become a contender for the title of the medical center of America” said the Philadelphia Press on June 3, 1916—tacitly admitting that the city already had lost such status (other newspapers agreed). The unlikely merger plan dissolved in 1917, and with it, the expectations for major foundation funding. By 1920, the Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies had contributed approximately $80 million for the development and endowment of American medical schools. None of this money came to Philadelphia.
Although some meaningful local gifts aided the city’s medical schools in this period and Philadelphia surely had wealth, no one in the city matched John D. Rockefeller. The largest single act of philanthropy aimed at education was by banker Anthony J. Drexel (1826-93), whose admirable creation of the Drexel Institute for Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) in 1893 centered for the most part on providing affordable practical education matched to the industrial needs of the city and the age. An assessment of Philadelphia philanthropy from 1893 praised Drexel, while declaring that the city’s millionaires tended to send their dollars far away–to “famine stricken Russians,” the “red man on the frontier,” and, generally, to “the dark and hidden places of the earth.”
A sampling of the leading journals of experimental work in medicine in the mid-1920s reveals that although Philadelphia sent forth a few papers, Boston, Baltimore, and New York generated substantially more. The earliest American medical scientists to win Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine included researchers at the Rockefeller Institute in New York and Harvard Medical School in Boston, but none from Philadelphia. Of course, the city’s medical fabric was not entirely dormant. Sound scientific work developed in microbiology and in some of the stronger “basic science” departments of the medical schools. In the early 1920s, A. Newton Richards (1876-1976) at Penn, who as a young imported pharmacologist-physiologist managed to survive the counter-revolution of 1910, carried out with colleagues brilliant studies of the function of the kidney. In doing so, he attracted some of the city’s earliest research support from a foundation, the Commonwealth Fund.

The Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Building of the University of Pennsylvania, built between 1957 and 1964, was certainly not Philadelphia’s first space for biomedical research. It is, however, the most widely known, being one of the most acclaimed designs of notable modernist architect Louis Kahn, himself a Philadelphian. It symbolizes the increase in laboratory science in the city which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. (Photograph by Steven J. Peitzman)
Philadelphia’s opportunity for a medical revival came in the 1950s. A flood of research support which appeared from the National Institutes of Health (and other governmental funding) led to, if not a leveling, at least considerable opportunity for all of Philadelphia’s medical schools, and some hospitals, to expand their clinical services and increase research productivity. Soon the schools swelled into “academic medical centers,” keenly competing with each other while looking more and more like each other. Woman’s Medical admitted men, and Hahnemann ejected Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy, as it made an astonishing transformation from minute doses (a tenet of this practice) to a skyscraper stacked high with intensive care units. In the absence rational planning based on needs of the citizens, many of the old neighborhood hospitals became poor and closed, while a corridor of high-tech clinical centers—Pennsylvania Hospital, Jefferson, Hahnemann/Drexel, Penn, Presbyterian—formed an imposing east-west alignment downtown. Temple to the north struggled valiantly with the burdens of caring for the sick and shot-up poor, as did the surviving hospitals in deteriorating districts. Beyond the city’s borders, some of the larger community hospitals, such as Lankenau and Abington in the suburbs and Cooper in Camden, expanded their educational functions and established successful research programs. All of this growth created jobs for nurses, physicians, scientists, technicians, billers and coders, and more, and required the ceaseless construction of buildings and additions. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics documented “education and health services” (combined in its statistics) as the region’s largest employment supersector.
Even in the period of decline in the early decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s medical institutions never lost their reputation for the highest quality training of medical students, residents, nurses, and pharmacists; in fact, the attraction grew as the major centers expanded. By the later decades of the twentieth century, “health care” and health-care education became the region’s dominant industry. White coats, short and long, continued as an enduring visible attribute of the city and region.
Steven J. Peitzman is Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. His historical work includes the book A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850 – 1998 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), and articles about medicine and medical education in Philadelphia and Germantown.
Topics: Health and Medicine

AIDS and AIDS Activism
Doctors in Philadelphia diagnosed the first local case of what would later become known as AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in September 1981, just months after the Centers for Disease Control first reported mysterious outbreaks of pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma among gay men in New York and Los Angeles that marked the beginning of ⇒ Read More

Anatomy and Anatomy Education
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dissection and study of human corpses became the primary method for medical students to gain intimate visual and tactile knowledge of the body and prepare to perform surgery on the living. As the chief medical city in the United States during this period, Philadelphia also became the leading center ⇒ Read More

Board of Health (Philadelphia)
Philadelphia suffered numerous outbreaks of epidemic disease throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until 1794, in the wake of the disastrous 1793 yellow fever outbreak, that a group of concerned citizens founded the Board of Health, independent of the city’s control. In the nineteenth century, the city supported the board with ⇒ Read More

Byberry (Philadelphia State Hospital)
From the arrival of its first patients in 1911 to 1990, when the Commonwealth formally closed it down, the Philadelphia State Hospital, popularly known as Byberry, was the home for thousands of mental patients. In its early decades Byberry was controlled by the city, and from 1938 onward it was one of the several hundred ⇒ Read More

Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania
The Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was founded in 1882 by a group of predominantly women volunteers to address social issues plaguing the city of Philadelphia, such as drunkenness, child homelessness, and rampant crime. Child welfare advocate Helen W. Hinckley led the charge, assisted by Cornelia Hancock (1840–1928), who had volunteered as a nurse in ⇒ Read More

Cholera
The cholera epidemics that struck Philadelphia in 1832, 1849, and 1866 provided a catalyst for transforming the health and hygiene standards of the city. Asiatic cholera, endemic to India, escaped the sub-continent in 1817. It reached Western Europe in 1831, and was carried to North America in 1832 aboard immigrant ships, breaking out in Philadelphia ⇒ Read More

College of Physicians of Philadelphia
One of the oldest professional medical societies in the United States, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia was founded in 1787 “to advance the science of medicine and to thereby lessen human misery.” At the time, Philadelphia, home to the first general hospital and medical college, was the center of American medicine. The College of ⇒ Read More

Deafness and the Deaf
Documentation of the lives of deaf individuals in the Philadelphia region, and elsewhere, is limited. Historic accounts depict desperate individuals roaming the streets or begging. Prior to the advent of public schools for the deaf, only elite deaf individuals received private tutoring. In the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia philanthropists, religious figures, educators, merchants, and policymakers ⇒ Read More

Dentistry and Dentists
As dentistry slowly emerged as a profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, innovative dentists in Philadelphia helped to shape dental care, procedures, and tools. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, dental colleges, journals, and societies contributed to the expansion of dental training and practice, which gradually but increasingly became accessible to women and people of ⇒ Read More

Dispensaries
Free clinics known as dispensaries served the “working poor” of European, British, and American cities from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Paid or volunteer physicians saw patients on site or at their homes in the dispensary’s district, caring for both minor ailments and more serious diseases. The Philadelphia Dispensary for the Medical Relief ⇒ Read More

Eugenics
In 1883 Francis Galton (1822–1911), an English statistician and sociologist, invented a term for his decades-long genealogical investigations into “fit” and “unfit” families: eugenics, the scientific study of being well-born. While Galton tended to focus on the fit, in the United States, enthusiasts for eugenics more often focused on those deemed biologically unfit. Elwyn, Pennsylvania, ⇒ Read More

Gross Clinic (The)
The Gross Clinic, painted in 1875 by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), is among the most highly regarded American artworks from the nineteenth century. It is a portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (1805-84), an internationally celebrated surgeon who taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia from 1856 to 1882. Created by a local artist and depicting ⇒ Read More

Home Remedies
Although Philadelphia has been a premier city for medical innovation since the mid-eighteenth century, the diverse peoples of the region also have used home remedies to heal themselves. Home remedies preserve traditional domestic healthcare practices, and they have persisted into the twenty-first century as part of alternative medicine and mainstream scientific therapies. Medical recipes often ⇒ Read More

Hospitals (Economic Development)
As the twenty-first century began, hospitals and academic medical centers played a central role in the economies of many major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia. As centers not only of patient care but also of scientific research and, often, sources of urban redevelopment, urban medical institutions created jobs in deindustrialized cities and spurred the spatial, social, ⇒ Read More

Infectious Diseases and Epidemics
Despite Philadelphia’s prominence, throughout its history, as a center for medical education and care, the region has experienced numerous epidemics of infectious disease. British America’s largest city in the eighteenth century, Philadelphia suffered dreadful outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever, while the nineteenth century brought an exotic new disease—cholera—that killed hundreds. By the early twentieth ⇒ Read More

Influenza (“Spanish Flu” Pandemic, 1918-19)
As World War I drew to a close in November 1918, the influenza virus that took the lives of an estimated 50 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919 began its deadly ascent. The United States had faced flu pandemic before, in 1889-90 for example, but the 1918 strain represented an altogether new and aggressive ⇒ Read More

Lazaretto
Situated roughly ten miles south of Philadelphia, in Essington, on the west bank of the Delaware River, the Lazaretto is considered to be the oldest and last surviving quarantine station in the United States. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Lazaretto was the first stop for immigrants and merchants on incoming ships whose passengers ⇒ Read More

Legionnaires’ Disease
The outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia-like disease in the Philadelphia region in the summer of 1976 puzzled doctors and public health officials. Many of the sick had attended an American Legion convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, giving the new illness the name “Legionnaires’ disease.” Months later, doctors discovered that bacteria in the hotel’s air conditioning ⇒ Read More

Medical Publishing
The U.S. medical publishing industry got its start in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century, and the Philadelphia region has maintained its preeminence in the industry ever since. The industry grew with the general book-selling industry, flourished as medicine acquired a solid scientific foundation starting around the end of the nineteenth century, went through a ⇒ Read More

Medicine (Colonial Era)
In colonial Philadelphia, physicians and other medical practitioners contended with a difficult disease environment. The best medical efforts of the day were often inadequate or even harmful in the face of chronic illness and epidemic disease. The health of the colonial population varied by race and region. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as in the ⇒ Read More

Mummies
Philadelphia’s fascination with Egyptian mummies began modestly, but by the end of the nineteenth century the city held some of the largest collections of mummies in the United States. Although some mummies had only a transient stay in Philadelphia or were lost to the ravages of time, many remained in museums to teach later generations ⇒ Read More

Mütter Museum
In 1849, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, following trends in medical education and research, created a museum of anatomy and pathology. After Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-59) donated his world-class collection in 1858, the expanded institution became the Mütter Museum—one of the best medical collections in the city and in the country. Together, as their ⇒ Read More

Nursing
The history of nursing in the Philadelphia area is one of long and storied traditions. Men and women have often nursed their sick families and friends at home, which for millennia represented the best, safest, and most comforting site for treatment and care. Bringing a stranger into that home to provide nursing care was a ⇒ Read More

Pennhurst State School and Hospital
During eight decades of continuous operation (1908-87), Pennhurst evolved from a model facility into the subject of tremendous public scandal and controversy before the federal courts ordered it closed and the remaining residents moved elsewhere. Twenty years after its closure, the Pennhurst campus was recognized as an International Site of Conscience and its history became ⇒ Read More

Pharmaceutical Industry
Philadelphia played a key role in the birth of the American pharmaceutical industry in the early nineteenth century, and the region remained a major pharmaceutical center into the early twenty-first century. Home since the colonial period to many of America’s leading scientific, educational, and medical institutions, Philadelphia was well-positioned to support the emergence of a ⇒ Read More

Public Health
From the moment Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans came together in the Delaware Valley, they confronted a host of health threats. Philadelphia’s earliest public health efforts reflected the lack of scientific understanding of infectious diseases, and usually began only after an outbreak commenced. After the terrible 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Philadelphia’s leaders founded a permanent ⇒ Read More

Smoking and Smoking Regulations
The origins of smoking tobacco in the Philadelphia region can be traced to the era before European colonization and evolved from pipes and cigars to the commercialization of cigarettes beginning in the late nineteenth century. Philadelphia-area farmers grew tobacco, local manufacturers produced cigars and cigarettes, and the N.W. Ayer advertising agency helped Camel cigarettes become ⇒ Read More

Typhoid Fever and Filtered Water
Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century stood shamefully high among large American cities in rates of death from typhoid fever (also known as enteric fever). Caused by a type of Salmonella bacterium, the disease had become common in Philadelphia and other cities with crowded populations, inadequate disposal of human waste, and lack of water treatment. ⇒ Read More

University City Science Center
The University City Science Center, the nation’s first and oldest urban research park, represents a pivotal chapter in the story of American urban renewal, its associated racial tensions, and the important role played by institutions of higher education. Established in 1960 in West Philadelphia adjacent to and intertwining the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania ⇒ Read More

Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania
The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, founded in 1850 as the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, was the first medical school in the world for women authorized to award them the M.D. It was established in Philadelphia by a group of progressive Quakers and a businessman who believed that women had a right to education ⇒ Read More

Women’s Education
As home to the first chartered school for girls in the United States, the country’s first medical college for women, one of the earliest chapters of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and coeducational and women’s colleges, the Philadelphia region provided pioneering models in women’s education. These innovations operated in the context of national ⇒ Read More
Yellow Fever
For more than a century beginning in the late seventeenth century, sudden outbreaks of yellow fever sowed death and panic throughout Philadelphia and its environs. With medical science seemingly powerless against it, yellow fever was a terrifying and mysterious threat that rivaled any disease of the era in its capacity to take lives and disrupt ⇒ Read More
Gallery: Health and Medicine
Timeline: Health and Medicine
Map: Health and Medicine
[google-map-sc width = 630 height = 630 zoom= 10 cat = 270]Links & Related Reading: Health and Medicine
Links
- Digital Resources (Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians)
- Philadelphia Historical Digital Image Library (Thomas Jefferson University and Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
- Philadelphia Poxes and Plagues (Thomas Jefferson University)
- Timeline: A History of Area Medical Innovations (Philly.com)
- The Mutter Museum
- New Jersey Medical Postcard Collection (Rutgers University Libraries)
- Jefferson scientists investigate immune-based brain tumor therapy (NewsWorks, November 13, 2014)
- Happy 500th birthday, Vesalius! Celebrating the founder of modern anatomy, Mutter style (NewsWorks, December 23, 2014)
- New $19 million wellness center aims to transform one of Philly's most struggling neighborhoods (NewsWorks, March 16, 2015)
- Penn's School of Medicine -- nation's oldest -- turns 250 (NewsWorks, May 21, 2015)
- In Philadelphia, Biden launches 'moonshot' initiative to cure cancer (NewsWorks, January 16, 2016)
- How a Philadelphia doctor changed the way we think about lead poisoning (NewsWorks. March 29, 2016)
- Penn gets $5.5 million grant to study hospital infections (NewsWorks, June 27, 2016)
- For the first time, historic prison offers tours of the hospital (NewsWorks, May 1, 2017)
Related Reading
Abrahams, Harold. The Extinct Medical Schools of Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966.
Bell, Whitfield J. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia: A Bicentennial History. Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1987.
Corner, George W. Two Centuries of Medicine: A History of the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965.
Croskey, John Welsh. History of Blockley. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1929.
Frederick P. Henry, ed. Founders Week Memorial Volume. Philadelphia: City of Philadelphia, 1909.
Graham, Kristen A. A History of Pennsylvania Hospital. Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2008.
Konkle, Burton. Standard History of the Medical Profession of Philadelphia. Edited by Frederick P. Henry. 2nd ed. enlarged and corrected by Lisabeth Holloway. New York: AMS Press, 1977 (orig. ed. Chicago, 1897).
Marion, John Francis. Philadelphia Medica, Being a Guide to the City’s Historical Places of Health Interest. Philadelphia: Smith Kline Corporation, 1975.
McCarthy, Michael P. Typhoid and the Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987.
Peitzman, Steven. A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Powell, James. Bring out Your Dead : The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. 1949. Reprint with a new introduction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Rogers, Naomi. An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Collections
Historical Medical Library, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 19 S. Twenty-Second Street, Philadelphia.
The Legacy Center, Archives and Special Collections, Drexel University College of Medicine, 2900 W. Queen Lane, Philadelphia.
Medical Affairs Records, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, Suite 210, 3401 Market Street, Philadelphia.
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, Suite 210, 3401 Market Street, Philadelphia.
University Archives and Special Collections, Thomas Jefferson University, Scott Memorial Library, 1020 Walnut Street, Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania Hospital Medical Library, 800 Spruce Street, Philadelphia.