Qualla: University of Virginia Health System

University of Virginia Health System: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jefferson recruited his medical school's first professor from London in 1824. The man, Dr. Robley Dunglison, taught a single course of lectures in the spring of 1825, the year the University of Virginia opened. The 10th medical school established in the United States grew slowly: it took seventy-six years to build a hospital, and another fifty-nine before Black patients were treated in the same wards as white ones. Today the UVA Health System runs an 800-bed academic medical center on the slope just southwest of the Lawn - the city's largest employer, treating more than 875,000 outpatients a year - and the institution it has become carries the weight of how it got here.

University of Virginia Health System: Jefferson's Medical School

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the first meeting of the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors in 1819, Thomas Jefferson authorized a School of Medicine - one of ten original schools in the new university. He sent a letter to London asking Robley Dunglison to come over and teach. Dunglison did. Classes ...

University of Virginia Health System: Segregation and Integration

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 1960, Black patients at the UVA Hospital were treated in segregated wards in the basement. The hospital that called itself an instrument of public good limited the care it offered by race for the first six decades of its existence. The integration that finally came was forc...

University of Virginia Health System: The Mix-Up of 1995

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On June 30, 1995, the maternity ward sent two newborns home with the wrong families. The mistake was not discovered until the summer of 1998, when a DNA paternity test ordered during a divorce revealed that one of the children had been switched at birth. Custody battles followed....

University of Virginia Health System: The Sprawling Hospital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today the medical center has 701 inpatient beds plus a 71-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit and a separate Children's Hospital with 106 pediatric beds. It is a Level I trauma center served by Pegasus, the air-and-ground critical-care transport service whose helicopter pad...

University of Virginia Health System: What You See From the Air

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From above the medical campus reads as a dense knot of brick and glass on the slope just southwest of the Lawn, distinct from the historic Academical Village but tethered to it. The main hospital tower is the tallest building. The Battle Building's helipad catches the sun on its ...