Indiana University School of Medicine
The Indiana University School of Medicine is a major, multi-campus medical school located throughout the U.S. state of Indiana and is both the undergraduate and graduate medical school of Indiana University. There are nine campuses throughout the state; the principal research, educational, and medical center is located on the campus of Indiana University Indianapolis. With 1,448 MD students, 191 PhD students, and 1,438 residents and fellows in the 2024–25 academic year, IUSM is the largest medical school in the United States. The school offers many joint degree programs including an MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program. It has partnerships with Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, other Indiana University system schools, and various in-state external institutions. It is the medical school with the largest number of graduates licensed in the United States per a 2018 Federation of State Medical Boards survey with 11,828 licensed physicians.
The school has pioneered research in multiple specialties, including oncology, immunology, substance use, neuroscience, and endocrinology. Research discoveries include a curative therapy for testicular cancer, the development of echocardiography, the identification of several genes linked to Alzheimer's disease, and the creation of inner ear sensory cells from pluripotent stem cells.
In the 2023 U.S. News & World Report rankings of the best graduate schools for medicine, the school ranked 23rd in the nation for primary care and 41st for research out of 192 medical schools. In the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the best hospitals, the Indiana University Health Medical Center had seventeen nationally ranked clinical programs. The Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health is nationally ranked in 9 of 10 designated specialties for children in the U.S. News & World Report. The IU School of Medicine is also home to the Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. In federal fiscal year 2023, IUSM ranked 29th for National Institutes of Health funding among all US medical schools with $243,608,100 of funding.
It was the only medical school in the state from when the Valparaiso University School of Medicine closed in 1917 to when the Tom and Julie Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine at Marian University opened in 2010. IUSM remains the state's only allopathic, MD degree-granting school.
The average MCAT score needed to be accepted into the IU School of Medicine in 2015 was 512, which is slightly higher than the national average, or roughly 506.5. The same year, the lowest score accepted was 497, while the highest score accepted by the school was 527.
History
Indiana University established a department of medicine at Bloomington in 1903, but the school in Indianapolis traces its founding to 1908, following the resolution of a rivalry with Purdue University over which institution had the legal authority to establish a medical school in Marion County. A year after the IU- and Purdue-affiliated schools in Indianapolis were consolidated in 1908, the Indiana General Assembly authorized IU to operate a medical school in Marion County.Founding in Bloomington
In March 1903, William Lowe Bryan, the tenth president of IU, proposed the formation of a department of medicine at IU Bloomington to the university trustees. The new department was approved and established in May of the same year. The IU School of Medicine was admitted as a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1904.In addition to IUSM in Bloomington, IU's leaders wanted to locate medical training facilities in Indianapolis. Their initial plan was to provide medical students with the first two years of coursework at Bloomington and the final two years at Indianapolis, where students would receive clinically based training as part of their studies. Prior to 1908, due primarily to the high cost of establishing its own medical facilities in Indianapolis, IU attempted to merge with existing medical schools, but the effort was unsuccessful.
Earlier schools
The current school in Indianapolis is a chaotic mixture of many earlier medical colleges. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw many short-lived medical schools established in Indiana, mostly in Indianapolis, with the majority lasting less than a decade. This is mostly attributable to financial reasons and because most of medical education at this time was taught through an apprenticeship system and through private, for-profit schools. University-based schools with access to state funding and endowments became the standard model for medical education later on in the 1890s, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way.The first Indiana school was established in 1833 as the Christian College at New Albany. It was largely regarded as a fraudulent diploma mill, and offered courses, but not degrees, in medicine. It closed the same year. The first public medical school, Vincennes University's department of medicine, was short lived as well, only lasting 1837–1838. Many other schools of varying quality and regard would open and close throughout the next 70 years.
The first successful school was the private LaPorte University School of Medicine founded in 1841. The first proprietary school was the Indiana Central Medical College founded in Indianapolis in 1849; it served as the medical department of Indiana Asbury University, today known as DePauw University. John Stough Bobbs, a pioneer local physician, served as the ICMC's dean. LPSM was renamed to the Indiana Medical College in 1846 and would ultimately merge into the ICMC in 1851; the ICMC would itself close in 1852.
In 1869, another school, also named the Indiana Medical College, was launched by Bobbs and colleagues as an outgrowth of the Indianapolis Academy of Medicine. Initial classes were held in the Old Indiana Statehouse; as the building was actively falling apart around this time, classes were soon moved to a building at the northwest corner of Delaware and Court streets. Clinical classes were taught at the Indianapolis City Hospital and various other hospitals and clinics around the city. The IMC would associate with IU in 1871; though the partnership ended in 1876 when IU failed to receive state funding for medical instruction. The Doctor of Medicine program at the IMC was not particularly rigorous, and one could graduate after only five months of study. However, graduates still required years of apprenticeship post-graduation, equivalent to a modern-day medical residency.
Samuel A. Elbert, the first African American to receive a medical degree in Indiana, graduated from the IMC in 1871 following a dispute with the college.
In 1874, the College of Physicians and Surgeons opened in Indianapolis as a breakaway school from the Indiana Medical College following a dispute over admissions policies; the schools reunited as the Medical College of Indiana and associated with Butler University in 1878. The MCI's building was located at the northeast corner of South Pennsylvania and East Maryland streets; it was destroyed by a fire in 1894. Following a bequest by physician William Lomax, a new medical education building named in Lomax's honor was constructed in 1895 at 212 North Senate Ave. It was razed in 1960 for the construction of the Indiana Government Center North, surviving both extensive water damage in 1916 and fire damage in 1919.
Two more medical schools opened in 1879: the Indianapolis-based Central College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Fort Wayne College of Medicine. The CCPS was founded by dissidents from the MCI unhappy with the association with Butler, and moved into a building at 214 North Senate Avenue, just up the road from the MCI. The FWCM briefly associated with Taylor University from 1890 to 1893.
In 1896, the MCI, Butler, and the Indiana Law School formed a loose collection of colleges named the University of Indianapolis, not related to the modern university of the same name. The Indiana Dental College joined U of I in 1904. Plans existed to create a central campus and expand the number of component colleges but they never materialized, and thus U of I remained an amorphous entity. Its component colleges gradually joined with IU over time with the exception of Butler, which remains independent to this day.
After IUSM was founded in 1903, formal negotiations opened between IU and the MCI for the MCI to leave U of I and join with IU; however, due to fundamental disagreements on where the resulting school of medicine would be located, the proposal was not ratified, and by 1904 the matter was indefinitely abandoned.
Rivalry with Purdue University
While negotiations were ongoing between IU and the Medical College of Indiana, representatives from the Central College of Physicians and Surgeons approached Purdue University's medical department in West Lafayette, which had been established sometime prior to 1895, to arrange a similar union. The Purdue trustees declined the offer, not wanting to interfere with the concurrent negotiations between IU and the MCI. In May 1905, the MCI submitted the same proposal that had failed ratification with IU to Purdue's trustees. The trustees took the proposal into consideration, and were "convinced that the conditions were unusually favorable to the consummation of a union of interests where all previous efforts had failed, and to the inauguration of a progressive educational movement of great value to the State". By September the proposal was accepted subject to the approval of the state legislature, and the MCI became part of Purdue University with the full title of "the Indiana Medical College, the School of Medicine of Purdue University".On September 25, 1905, the trustees of the CCPS voted to suspend operations and to transfer the students, alumni, personal property, and funds of the college to the Purdue School of Medicine. Later on October 2, the Fort Wayne College of Medicine voted to likewise merge with the Purdue School of Medicine and transfer personnel and equipment to Indianapolis. The Purdue School of Medicine operated out of the former MCI's facilities at 212 North Senate Avenue in Indianapolis, in the immediate vicinity of the Indiana Statehouse. The building that housed the CCPS was sold. In May 1906, 122 students received medical degrees from Purdue University and successfully passed the examination of the State Board of Medical Registration. In the spring of 1907, Purdue graduated 68 men and four women; in that class was Arett C. Arnett, a physician who helped establish a Lafayette clinic in 1922 later known as Arnett Clinic and today known as Indiana University Health Arnett Hospital.
In 1906, the faculty of the Purdue School of Medicine published a resolution in the Indiana Medical Journal and the daily press stating that all graduates of the Medical College of Indiana, the Central College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Fort Wayne College of Medicine were entitled to the degree of Doctor of Medicine and such diploma from Purdue University; that graduates of the former schools could receive these items upon application to Purdue; and the alumni records of the three former schools would thereafter be kept as the records of the Indiana Medical College, the School of Medicine of Purdue University. Immediately thereafter on April 3, 1906, alumni of the former CCPS passed a resolution rejecting the Indiana Medical College as their alma mater, and expressed support that "the only logical place for a State Medical Department" was with Indiana University.
The founding of the Purdue-controlled consolidated medical school in 1905 triggered a debate over which state university, IU or Purdue, had the legal authority to establish a state-supported, four-year medical school in Indianapolis. IU believed that under the legislative act that elevated Indiana College to a university on February 15, 1838, it had the sole authorization to provide state-supported instruction in medicine; but, the development of a medical school had been delayed due to a lack of sufficient funding. A legal opinion published by a W. H. H. Miller on October 31, 1905, stated that the university did not have clear authority to conduct a medical program outside Monroe County, as that legislative act only mentioned medical education "on the grounds of the university". The rivalry was so intense that it is sometimes labeled as the instigating factor for the cancellation of athletic events between the universities from 1906 to 1908; however, newspapers from the time cite a fight that occurred at a baseball game in West Lafayette on May 31, 1906, as the cause.
The building that was sold and had housed the former CCPS would eventually come under the ownership of IU supporters, who would establish a separate medical school, the State College of Physicians and Surgeons, there in 1906. Clinical faculty were recruited from those unhappy with the arrangement with Purdue. This school offered clinical instructions to IU Bloomington's third- and fourth-year medical students. The SCPS enrolled 109 students in September 1906. In August 1907, the IU board of trustees agreed to a merger of the IU School of Medicine in Bloomington with the SCPS in Indianapolis but agreed to take financial responsibility only for the school's facilities in Monroe County. The first two years of training continued at Bloomington and the final two years of clinical training were held at the SCPS in Indianapolis, with a Doctor of Medicine degree conferred by Indiana University.