The University of Utah School of Medicine is located on the upper campus of the University of UtahinSalt Lake City, Utah. It was founded in 1905 and is currently the only MD-granting medical school in the state of Utah.
The school began in 1905 when the Biology department offered a two-year medical course.[1] The founding dean was Dr. Ralph Vary Chamberlin. In 1912, the medical program was established as a separate two-year medical school and became a member of both the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association.[2] For the next 30 years, it continued as a two-year program; students were required to complete their final two years of training at other medical schools. The board of regents approved a four-year medical school in 1942.[3]
In the 1950s and 1960s, the University of Utah School of Medicine emerged as a prominent center for bio-medical research, thanks to the work of pioneering physicians and scientists such as Maxwell Wintrobe, Louis Goodman, Homer R. Warner, and Willem Kolff. To this day, the school maintains a reputation for strong scientific investigation, especially in fields such as genetics and bio-medical informatics.
Medical education expanded significantly in 1977, when the University of Utah formed a partnership with Primary Children's Hospital, thus providing the medical school with a dedicated facility for teaching and research in pediatrics.[4] The medical center has expanded even more in recent years, with the creation of the Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1995 and the expansion of the Moran Eye Center in 2006. Such developments have provided even greater learning opportunities for medical students, residents, and fellows at the school.
Edward I. Hashimoto - popular professor of human anatomy from 1935 to 1987; longest-tenured professor in the history of the University of Utah (52 years)
Susan Horn - statistician and researcher in biomedical informatics
Vivian Lee - radiologist and administrator; served as Senior Vice President for health sciences, CEO of University Healthcare, and dean of the medical school at Utah
John M. Opitz - medical geneticist who has identified and described many different genetic syndromes
The field of biomedical informatics was developed at the University of Utah. The Department of Biomedical Informatics was created in 1964[8] - the first in the nation - and today remains one of the most renowned programs of its kind in the world.
In 1970, the university's hospital established the first cerebrovascular disease unit in the U.S. west of the Mississippi River.
On December 1, 1982, the first artificial heart implant was performed at the University of Utah (by Dr. DeVries, mentioned above). The patient, retired dentist Barney Clark, had suffered from congestive heart failure. He survived for 112 days after the procedure. The implanted device was designed by Robert Jarvik (also mentioned above), who was a medical student at the U of U at the time.
Utah is known throughout the world as a leader in the study of human genetics. The school has been involved in some of the most valuable research in field, such as the sequencing of the tumor suppressorgenes responsible for breast cancer in the 1990s.
WebPath, the world's most popular pathology education website, was created in 1994 by Edward C. Klatt, a professor in the Department of Pathology at the time.
Advanced Wilderness Life Support (AWLS) is a certification course created at the University of Utah in 1997.[9] AWLS is the gold standard program - both nationally and internationally - for teaching management of medical emergencies in wilderness situations.
