When the Board of Visitors met in 1819 to authorize the new university's schools, medicine was on the list. Jefferson wrote to Cabell that the school should cover the elements of medical science with a history and explanation of all its successive theories from Hippocrates to the present day. To run it, he wrote to London and recruited Robley Dunglison, a young English physician then in his twenties. Dunglison crossed the Atlantic with his wife in early 1825 and took up the only medical chair in Charlottesville. He taught alone for the first year. He later became known as the Father of American Physiology and served as Jefferson's personal physician in the final months of the founder's life. He was at Monticello when Jefferson died on July 4, 1826. The first medical degrees the school awarded came in 1828. From one professor it has grown to over a thousand faculty members and more than three hundred working laboratories.

The school's research record reads like a survey of twentieth-century physiology. In the 1930s, biochemist Alfred Chanutin worked out the role of 2,3-DPG in how red blood cells release oxygen - work that transformed how donated blood is stored and made modern transfusion therapy possible. In 1939, a pediatrician and an intern at UVA established vitamin K's role in preventing hemorrhagic disease of the newborn. Robert M. Berne pioneered adenosine's role in cardiovascular function in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to its use as a frontline treatment for supraventricular tachycardia. Alfred G. Gilman, a UVA pharmacology professor in the 1970s, discovered G-proteins - the cellular relays that translate hormone signals into action - and won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. Ferid Murad, working at UVA in medicine, showed that nitric oxide is the body's elusive endothelium-derived relaxing factor and shared the 1998 Nobel for that discovery. Barry Marshall received the 1995 Lasker Award and later a Nobel for identifying Helicobacter pylori as the cause of peptic ulcer disease - research he extended and developed during a decade as a professor here from 1986 to 1996.

More recent discoveries have come from the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, known on campus simply as BIG. In 2015 a team in the Department of Neuroscience discovered what textbooks had said for a century did not exist: a network of lymphatic vessels running through the meninges of the brain. The finding meant that the central nervous system, long believed to be sealed off from the body's immune defenses, was directly plumbed into them. The paper was nominated for Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year. Other UVA work in the same period identified major genetic causes of schizophrenia and a link between the immune system and social behavior. The Center for Diabetes Technology has done foundational work on the artificial pancreas, the closed-loop insulin delivery system that has transformed type 1 diabetes care. The Department of Perceptual Studies, founded in 1967, sits at the school's unusual edge - one of the few academic research groups in the world investigating reports of supernatural phenomena with board-certified scientists.

Walter Reed graduated from the UVA School of Medicine in 1869. As a U.S. Army physician three decades later, he confirmed the theory of the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes - the discovery that made possible the eradication campaigns in Havana and Panama and saved countless lives. The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda carries his name. Vivian Pinn, who earned her medical degree at UVA in 1967, became the first full-time director of the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health, where she spent twenty years working to integrate women into clinical trials. Pinn College, one of the school's four learning communities, is named for her. Thelma Brumfield Dunn, an NIH pathologist known as the First Lady of Cancer Research for her work on murine tumorigenesis, was also a UVA graduate. The school's four learning communities are named for Reed, Pinn, Dunglison, and Hunter - generations of medical thought reduced to four blocks of student offices.

In September 2024, 128 faculty members and physicians signed a letter of no confidence against Dean Melina Kibbe and UVA Health CEO Craig Kent, citing what the letter called a culture of fear and retaliation. The university hired Williams and Connolly to investigate. Kent resigned in March 2025; Kibbe followed in July, after being named president of the University of Texas Health Science Center. The school is currently under interim leadership. From the air, the medical school sits just south of the historic Lawn, its working buildings - Pinn Hall, the MR research towers, the West Complex - clustered together on the slope above the hospital. The Claude Moore Medical Education Building, where students now learn, opened in 2010. The first dissection Jefferson worried about in 1825 happened in a single small theater. Today the campus contains a quarter of UVA's research footprint.