University of Louisville School of Medicine

Louisville Medical Institute

By the early 1830s, Louisville had become a center for inland transportation into the United States. Seeking to develop cultural institutions, citizens (notably town trustee and future United States Secretary of the Treasury James Guthrie) called for a medical school to be founded in Louisville. The city government appropriated funds for a new medical school at Eighth and Chestnut Streets. Much of the Louisville Medical Institute's early faculty came from Transylvania Medical Institute in Lexington, Kentucky. Theodore Stout Bell, a prominent physician at Transylvania Medical Institute, helped initiate this faculty transfer by suggesting that Louisville would have better clinical cadavers for medical study than Lexington. Classes at the Louisville Medical Institute began in temporary quarters in fall 1837, eventually moving to a building designed by Kentucky architect Gideon Shryock eight months later. Clinical teaching took part in the wards of Louisville City Hospital (now University Hospital). By the early 1840s, University of Louisville School of Medicine had become a distinguished center for medical education, attracting students from a wide variety of locations in the southern and western United States.

University of Louisville Medical Department

In 1846, by ruling of the Kentucky Legislature, the Louisville Medical Institute became the Medical Department of the newly founded University of Louisville. Many notably physicians and researchers became affiliated with the medical department, including Daniel Drake, Charles Wilkins Short, J. Lawrence Smith, Benjamin Silliman, and David Wendell Yandell.

In the early 1950s, Grace Marilynn James joined the faculty of the University of Louisville School of Medicine as the first African American women on staff towards ending racial segregation in Louisville area hospitals and medical professional organizations.

Health Sciences Center

The 1960s saw a period of major growth in the University of Louisville Medical Department. University officials began construction of a Health Sciences Center, where health-related study and research would take place and the School of Medicine would be located. The Health Sciences Center included a 120,000-square-foot Medical-Dental Research Building (opened in 1963), new buildings to house the medical and dental schools, a library, and laboratory buildings. Vice President for health affairs Harold Boyer oversaw state appropriation of funds for the construction of a new teaching hospital and ambulatory care center.

In 1997, the Kentucky General Assembly approved House Bill 1, also known as the Higher Education Reform Act. It included the mandate that the University of Louisville become a premier metropolitan research university by 2020. Today, the Health Sciences Center features over 200,000 square feet of state-of-the-art research facilities, a standardized patient clinic and one of the largest academic medical simulation centers in the United States.

There are five hospitals within walking distance of the Health Sciences Center campus, with the VA Hospital 5 minutes away, where students perform their clinical rotations. The Louisville Medical Center serves more than 500,000 patients each year:

Innovations

Throughout its history, the University of Louisville School of Medicine has been a pioneer in terms of modern medical practice and surgical procedure. Notably, the University of Louisville housed the world's first emergency room, opened in 1911 and developed by surgeon Arnold Griswold in the 1930s. Griswold also developed autotransfusion, the process by which a person receives their own blood for a transfusion rather than banked donor blood.

In 1998, Dr. Roberto Bolli led a U of L team that identified an intracellular molecule that could protect the heart from ischemic myocardial damage. This group presented its findings to 40,000 cardiologists at the 1998 American Heart Association (AHA) conference. Dr. Bolli also headed a U of L team that was awarded an $11.7 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute—part of the National Institutes of Health—to continue to build on this research in 2005, marking the largest nationally competitive NIH grant awarded to the university. NIH reviewers rated the proposed research program as exceedingly innovative and potentially high-impact, noting that it addresses an extremely important clinical problem in a way that will move treatments from the laboratory to the patient as quickly as possible. Using highly unusual language, the reviewers called the proposal "a paradigm of what a program project grant should be." Dr. Bolli is or has been on the editorial board of all major cardiovascular journals and is the Editor in Chief of Circulation Research. He has been a member of numerous NIH study sections and committees and is a member of the NHLBI Advisory Council. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Heart Association.

Surgeons from the University of Louisville in cooperation with the Kleinert and Kutz Hand Care Center and Jewish Hospital performed the first five hand transplants in the United States. The Hand Center performed one of the world's first cross-hand replantations, first reported repair of the digital artery, first bilateral upper arm replantation, first bilateral forearm replantation, first reported successful technique for primary flexor tendon repair, and first vascularized epiphyseal transfer. This center has pioneered work in primary reconstruction using free tissue transfer. The Christine M. Kleinert Institute hand surgery fellowship program is one of top fellowships in the world for hand and microsurgery.

In 2001, University of Louisville and Jewish Hospital physicians and researchers, Drs. Laman A. Gray, Jr. and Robert D. Dowling, performed the world's first implantation of the AbioCor Implantable Replacement Heart on July 2, in a seven-hour procedure at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. University of Louisville cardiothoracic surgeons have performed many other novel procedures, including Kentucky's first heart transplant, the world's first heart transplant following the use of a Thoratec left ventricular assist device, the world's first endoscopic saphenous vein harvest and the first ventricular remodeling in the region.

The James Graham Brown Cancer Center, an affiliate of Kentucky One Health and University of Louisville School of Medicine, has made several discoveries which has brought the center international attention. These discoveries include:

Brown Cancer Center scientists have developed three novel cancer treatments that are in early phase trials. Additionally, at least twenty-seven new drugs or targets which are in various stages of preclinical testing have also been developed. These treatments mark one of the most robust pipelines of any cancer center in the world. Accordingly, a biotech company partially owned by the University of Louisville/Brown Cancer Center, Advanced Cancer Therapeutics, has been initiated to ensure drugs are developed locally and quickly. The goal of the cancer center is to achieve National Cancer Institute designation, a goal they are on track to receive in the near future.

Students

The general applicant pool has become increasingly more competitive. Kentucky residents are selected for 120 of the approximately 155 seats in the School of Medicine program each year. Out of state seats are awarded to those with superior academic achievement, MCAT scores, research, community service and/or ties to Kentucky.

The entering Class of 2013 consisted of:

The School of Medicine offers several joint degree programs including MD/MA through the Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Bioethics and Medical Humanities, MD/MS through the School of Public Health & Information Sciences, MD/MBA through the UofL College of Business, and MD/PhD through any of the basic research departments in the School of Medicine: Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Pharmacology & Toxicology, Anatomy & Neurobiology, Microbiology & Immunology and Physiology & Biophysics. Arrangements can be made in special cases to design a program based in one of the degree-granting programs located at UofL's Belknap Campus.

Upon matriculation, each incoming student is assigned to one of six Advisory Colleges.

Notable alumni

The School of Medicine has numerous notable alumni, including 14 past presidents of the American Medical Association.