Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first medical school connected to a hospital in the United States, was founded in 1861. As an outcropping of Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, the medical college was at the forefront of treatment for New York's poorest residents.
In the nineteenth century, the rise of immigration to New York City taxed the city's public infrastructure. The model of patient care in which physicians attended to patients in their own homes was inaccessible to much of New York's growing population. Neighborhood dispensaries provided charitable medical care on the local level, and many patients seen by Sayre and his colleagues would have gone to dispensaries as their first line of treatment. In 1865-66, the Bellevue Hospital Medical College moved from the grounds of the hospital into a purpose built location which also contained one of the first walk-in outpatient centers in the United States, the Bureau of Medical and Surgical Relief for the Out-door Poor. This new model of treatment brought greater medical access to the poorest members of society, while also providing medical students with a constant influx of new patients to treat and study. Patients in need of serious surgical intervention might live on the wards at Bellevue and be seen by a rotating group of doctors, students, and other medical personnel.
Bellevue Hospital Medical College's growth in the mid-nineteenth century went hand-in-hand with rapid changes in American medical education. American medical schools in the first half of the nineteenth century were for-profit enterprises where students (almost entirely white men) paid to attend lectures and dissections. Medical students commonly graduated and began their professional lives without ever treating a patient.
Bellevue Hospital Medical College provided a different kind of educational experience, one in which students could observe the daily operations of a large hospital system filled with patients with unique medical needs. Medical students saw Sayre and his fellow physicians at work in the operating theater and on the hospital wards, although they did not actively participate in the treatment of patients. This access to patients was not uncomplicated. In his influential social history of the American hospital, The Care of Strangers, Dr. Charles E. Rosenberg notes that patients in charity hospitals “could hardly refuse to cooperate in clinical teaching; it was the principal way in which they could repay society for the gratuitous care they received.” Observation by students on the wards was thus both a benefit to the medical field and a sometimes invasive experience for the patients themselves.
In 1898, the Bellevue Hospital Medical College merged with University Medical College of New York University to form the University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College. The combined institutions became the New York University College of Medicine in 1935. In 1960, the name was changed to the New York University School of Medicine.
A brief timeline of NYU Langone Health History can be found here on the website of the Lillian & Clarence de la Chapelle Medical Archives. If you're interested in learning more about Bellevue Hospital, click here to listen to Dr. David Oshinsky discuss the hospital's history on NPR's All Things Considered.
Image 1: First building of the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, circa 1880. Historic images collection, Lillian & Clarence de la Chapelle Medical Archives.
Image 2: Cover of the second annual announcement for the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 1862-1863. Historic images collection, Lillian & Clarence de la Chapelle Medical Archives.