History
The University of Louisville is an urban institution which has had close historical and legal ties with the city of Louisville and Jefferson County. Founded in 1798 as Jefferson Seminary, later known as Louisville College, in 1846 it became the University of Louisville with an academic department and a medical school
A charter was granted for establishment of the Louisville Medical Institute in 1833. In 1837 the first class of eight students began their training at the City Workhouse. Clinical teaching in the wards of the public hospital known as the Louisville City Hospital was instituted as an integral part of the medical curriculum.
One of the first surgical laboratories in the U.S. was set up in 1841 in the basement of the medical Institute by Samuel D. Gross, professor of surgery, for studies of wounds of the intestine in dogs. Information and experience gained in this early experimental laboratory were applied to the care of patients.
The Louisville
Medical Institute became the Medical Department of the University of Louisville
by charter in 1846. Several subsequent mergers established the Louisville
institution as the only teaching medical center in the state of Kentucky until
1960.
The school
of Medicine was one of the first schools of medicine in the U.S. to have a
medical library as an integral part of the original school. The first
purchases for the library were made in 1838 with another large collection added
in 1841.
By 1970, an entire new medical school complex was built which included 300, 000 square feet of instructional and research buildings. The medical school is part of the Health Sciences Center, located near downtown Louisville. Since 1970, the Health Sciences Center has expanded with the building and completion of an Ambulatory Care Building, University Hospital, a Cancer Center that provides comprehensive treatment for the cancer patient and a parking garage with a modern exercise facility. The second of the two Donald E. Baxter Biomedical Research Buildings opened in the spring of 2003.
