Qualla: Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Martha Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, and Elizabeth King raised the money to finally open the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1893, they made the trustees agree to one condition: women would be admitted on equal terms with men. The school's first class had three women. The decision was radical at the time and became one of the great accelerants of American women in medicine. The school had opened twenty years after Johns Hopkins's bequest because the original funds had been depleted in building the hospital. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad stock that was supposed to underwrite both institutions had collapsed in value during the financial panics of the 1870s. The medical school existed at all because four wealthy women refused to fund anything less than coeducation.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Garrett's Demand

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mary Elizabeth Garrett was the daughter of John Work Garrett, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad president who had been one of Johns Hopkins's closest associates. When she inherited a significant share of the railroad fortune, she organized the campaign to fund the medical school. T...

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: The Flexner Report

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1908 the Carnegie Foundation commissioned the educator Abraham Flexner to survey the state of medical education in the United States and Canada. Flexner visited every medical school in North America - 155 of them - and his 1910 report transformed the field. Flexner held up Joh...

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: The Founding Faculty

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The school's first faculty included four physicians who shaped twentieth-century medicine. William Henry Welch, the pathologist who became the first dean, brought modern German laboratory science to American clinical medicine. William Osler, the Canadian internist whose textbook ...

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Seventeen Nobel Prizes

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Seventeen of the 29 Nobel laureates affiliated with Johns Hopkins University are tied to the medical school. They include Francis Peyton Rous, who won the 1966 Nobel for his demonstration that viruses can cause cancer; Hamilton O. Smith and Daniel Nathans, who shared the 1978 Nob...

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Bloomberg's Billion

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In July 2024, Michael Bloomberg - the billionaire former mayor of New York City and a 1964 Hopkins undergraduate - announced a $1 billion gift to the medical school. The gift made tuition free for all medical students whose families earn under $300,000 a year, beginning in fall 2...