A Brief History of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine is the country's largest medical school with 1,300 students on four sites. It stands at the corner of Polk and Wolcott streets, about two miles west of Chicago's downtown Loop.

The precursor to the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine was founded as the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago, popularly called P&S, in 1881. Five physicians established the proprietary medical school by personally funding a new building to house the first class of 100 students.

The curriculum consisted solely of clinical training during the first 10 years. But beginning with the 1891 term, an innovative program shift resulted in training in the basic sciences as well.

Medical schools flourished at the turn of the 20th century with 150 existing nationwide. P&S was one of 14 medical schools in Chicago. The large number of U.S. medical schools with inconsistent admission requirements and educational standards all contributed to an enormous excess of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners. In 1908, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching commissioned Abraham Flexner, an external reviewer, to study medical education in U.S. and Canadian medical schools. His findings, the 1910 Flexner Report, generated massive reforms in medical education that are still applied today. Flexner found P&S only one of a handful of Chicago medical schools deemed salvageable.

After two decades of negotiations among P&S, University of Illinois officials and state of Illinois legislators, the once proprietary medical school became the state’s first college of medicine, the College of Medicine of the University of Illinois, in 1913.

A cooperative agreement in 1919 between the university and the Illinois Department of Public Welfare resulted in the construction of the Research and Educational Hospitals, including a psychiatric institute, a surgical institute for children, an institute for juvenile research, a clinical institute and a new eye and ear infirmary. The university agreed to provide the facility with professional staff for teaching and research into the causes and prevention of disease.

The University of Illinois College of Medicine became one of the largest medical schools in the country in 1931. An entering class of 175 became the first in college history to attend classes in the new building at the current home of the college, 1853 W. Polk St., which is about two miles west of Chicago’s Loop.

In the early 1970s, the state mandated regional sites in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana-Champaign to provide health care for the state’s underserved. College wide, UIC now has the largest medical school in the country with a total enrollment of 1,300. Students pursue their medical school studies among the four educational sites.

The aging Research and Educational Hospitals were the catalyst to build the University of Illinois Hospital in 1980. The new Magnet Resonance Imaging Center has been designed to accommodate the 9.4 Tesla magnet, the world’s largest whole body magnet for medical imaging and opened in 2004. Current building projects include a new College of Medicine Research Building, opening September 2005.