A Brief History of the Johns Hopkins Medical CurriculumThe opening of the Medical school in 1893, four years after the Johns Hopkins Hospital received its first patients, was delayed because the university lacked the funds to establish the kind of medical school that had been envisioned.
Only with the action of powerful committee of women who raised the required $500,000 could the medical school finally begin to admit its first class of students.
The women who founded the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine incorporated into its curriculum various elements of the European methods of education that they had witnessed during their own training.
The teaching of the basic sciences in Baltimore was heavily influenced by the German model. The clinical sciences were taught in a way that blended British and Continental models.
The history of the curriculum of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is both unique and typical for American medical schools of the last hundred years.
It is unique because at the school’s inception in 1893, a remarkable talented young and innovative faculty began with a blank slate.
While the new venture in medical education in Baltimore, where six other medical schools were already teaching medical students, had no traditions to overcome, a second unique aspect of its history is that in the subsequent century the successor of the original faculty had always to measure themselves against the high standard and unique accomplishment founders.
At Johns Hopkins, as in all other medical schools, a dean or the faculty was periodically moved to assess the state of the curriculum by means of committees, reports and faculty discussions.
Typically, changes were minor in nature, and even reform measures that had wide faculty and administration approval were implemented only slowly.
A Brief History of the Johns Hopkins Medical Curriculum
