Geisel School of Medicine


The Geisel School of Medicine is the medical school of Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire. The fourth oldest medical school in the United States, it was founded in 1797 by New England physician Nathan Smith as the Dartmouth Medical School. It is one of the seven Ivy League medical schools.
Several milestones in medical care and research have taken place at Dartmouth, including the introduction of stethoscopes to U.S. medical education, the first clinical X-ray, and the first multispecialty intensive care unit in the United States.
The Geisel School of Medicine grants the Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. The school has a student body of approximately 700 students and more than 2,300 faculty and researchers. Geisel organizes research through over a dozen research centers and institutes, attracting more than $140 million in grants annually, and is ranked as a top medical school by U.S. News & World Report for both primary care and biomedical research. Geisel has numerous clinical partners, including Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, White River Junction Veterans Administration Medical Center, California Pacific Medical Center, and Manchester Veterans Administration Medical Center.

History

Foundation and early years

Dartmouth College's medical school was founded in 1797 as the fourth medical school in the United States, following the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the medical school of King's College , and Harvard Medical School. The founder was Nathan Smith, a Harvard University and University of Edinburgh Medical School educated physician from Cornish, New Hampshire. Noting the dearth of medical professionals in the rural Connecticut River Upper Valley area, Smith petitioned the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College in August 1796 to fund the establishment of a medical school to train more physicians for the region. Though Dartmouth College as a whole was financially strapped, the Board approved the request, and Smith began lecturing on November 22, 1797.
For much of its early life, the school consisted only of Nathan Smith and a small class of students, operating in borrowed space at Dartmouth College. Students of Smith were educated as apprentices, and received a Bachelor of Medicine degree upon graduation. Like Dartmouth College as a whole, the medical school had continual funding shortages. As time passed, however, the popularity of both the medical instruction and the basic sciences taught at the school drew undergraduates and training physicians alike. Soliciting funds from the state of New Hampshire, Smith was able to obtain medical equipment and, by 1811, a dedicated physical plant for the school.
Smith acted as the sole administrator and instructor of the medical school until 1810 when a second faculty member was hired. Smith also revamped the curriculum, allowing the school to begin offering the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1812. Smith ultimately left Dartmouth in 1816, founding three additional schools of medicine at Yale University, Bowdoin College, and the University of Vermont.

Expansion

Smith's departure provided for a period of expansion, both among the faculty and the student body. Former students of Nathan Smith's replaced him on the faculty, drawing medical professionals in the northeast such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to join them. The first hospital at the school was founded by DMS alumnus Dixi Crosby in 1838, who used it to integrate academic instruction with hands-on patient care. In 1870, Carlton Pennington Frost, DMS '57, replaced Crosby as Dean of the school. Under Frost, the curriculum sustained another revamping, this time into a four-year program that included clinical and academic training. Frost also presided over the establishment of Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in 1893, built to replace Crosby's defunct hospital.
In 1908, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching conducted a survey of medical education institutions in the United States. At the time, the discipline emphasized "bedside teaching" and providing students experience with a broad variety of illnesses and patients. The school's rural location was deemed too remote for proper clinical training, and the school was advised to stop offering the Doctor of Medicine degree and only provide pre-clinical instruction. The class of 1914 was the last to receive the Doctor of Medicine degree; subsequent classes of students attended DMS for two years before transferring to other medical schools. The drop of clinical instruction worsened the school's problems by driving away talented faculty members.
After World War II, the tide of the medical discipline had shifted towards research. Although the school was well regarded for preparing students for clinical education at other institutions, its faculty was criticized for its apparent disinterest in research. The school was also criticized for using Dartmouth College's undergraduate program as a feeder school. Based on these criticisms, DMS was placed on "confidential probation" in 1956 by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Council on Medical Education.

"Refounding"

At the time of the probation, Dartmouth College had already anticipated the medical school's plight, amassing capital to fund a revitalization of the school. In 1956, the trustees of the college formally agreed to a "refounding" of the school's academic offerings, physical facilities, and faculty. S. Marsh Tenney, DMS class of 1944, was appointed to carry out this task. Tenney more than doubled the size of the faculty and the student body, added several new departments, and oversaw the construction of five new campus buildings by 1964.
In the 1960s, due to a national shortage of physicians and government incentives for schools that increased their class sizes, Dartmouth Medical School graduates began to experience difficulty in trying to transfer to other medical schools to complete their final two years of medical school as other medical schools had increased their class size and could not accommodate transfer students. In the meantime, Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital had grown to be a 400-bed medical center, and Dartmouth Medical School had established a partnership with a 224-bed Veterans Administration Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont. The Doctor of Medicine program, now possible with the expanded local medical centers, was reinstated by a vote of the trustees in 1968. The admission of M.D. candidates resumed in 1970. Initially, the medical school curriculum was three years in length, unlike most medical schools, but it later was increased to the usual four years in 1979.
A cooperative program with Brown Medical School began in 1981 where students received training at both medical schools. Fifteen to twenty students were selected for the program, which combined the first two years of basic science coursework at Dartmouth with the final two years of clinical coursework at Brown. The program balanced Dartmouth's greater basic science facilities than Brown, but fewer clinical facilities than available at the urban setting of Brown, which is located in Providence, Rhode Island. Graduates of the program received M.D. degrees from Brown. The program was discontinued in 2010.

New Medical Center

In 1991, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center was established on a campus in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The three-year project, completed at the cost of $228 million, served as a replacement for the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, which was partially demolished in the early 1990s. A new curriculum was introduced in 1996 entitled "New Directions." The curriculum, still in place today, seeks to promote small classes, reduce the amount of lectures, and offer students extensive interactive experience with patients. 2009 saw the successful completion of a $250 million capital campaign.
On April 4, 2012, the Dartmouth Medical School was renamed the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine in honor of their many years of generosity to the college.

Facilities

The Geisel School of Medicine has facilities on the campus of Dartmouth College, which is situated in the Upper Valley town of Hanover, New Hampshire, as well at the hospital campus of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
The medical school facilities at Dartmouth College sit in a complex on the north end of Dartmouth's campus and includes academic, administrative, research, and presentation facilities. Geisel School of Medicine is served by two libraries, the Dana Biomedical Library and the Matthews-Fuller Health Sciences Library, which together offer over 240,000 volumes. Off-campus housing is available through Dartmouth College. In addition, the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center was completed in August 2011 at a cost of $92 million.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in nearby Lebanon, New Hampshire, is the primary affiliated teaching hospital of the Geisel School of Medicine. The 396-bed inpatient facility acts as the medical school's teaching hospital and main teaching site. Other constituent elements include the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic and a Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont. In total, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center serves an area with a population of 1.6 million.
In addition to on-campus instruction in Hanover and Lebanon, third- and fourth-year students may choose from 75 regional sites for their clerkships. Most clerkship facilities are located in central New England, although students are also able to clerk at sites in Alaska, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Florida.

Academics

Degree programs

The Geisel School of Medicine offers the four-year Doctor of Medicine degree and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in certain fields.
There are six PhD programs based in the Geisel School of Medicine: pharmacology and toxicology, molecular and cell biology, immunology, molecular pathogenesis, systems biology, and experimental and molecular medicine. Research and teaching positions at the Geisel School of Medicine and its centers and institutes are available to PhD candidates.
In addition to the MD degree, Geisel medical students participate in the following joint-degree programs at Dartmouth: