Qualla: University of Virginia School of Medicine

University of Virginia School of Medicine: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Dahl, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two weeks before his first medical school professor arrived from London in 1825, Thomas Jefferson wrote his collaborator Joseph C. Cabell that no dissections could begin until they built a proper anatomical theater - one that gave the students a good view of the operation and effectively excluded observation from without. Jefferson was eighty-two and dying. The single professor, Dr. Robley Dunglison, would arrive that spring and start teaching what would become the tenth medical school in the United States. From that one man's lectures grew an institution that has since trained Walter Reed, won two Nobel Prizes in physiology, and discovered that the brain talks to the immune system.

Image: Jeff Dahl | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of Virginia School of Medicine: Jefferson's Imported Professor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographer unknown, from original painting by E.C. Bruce, Public domain. 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...

Image: Photographer unknown, from original painting by E.C. Bruce | Public domain

University of Virginia School of Medicine: Discoveries That Changed Medicine

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philkon Phil Konstantin, Public domain. 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 ...

Image: Philkon Phil Konstantin | Public domain

University of Virginia School of Medicine: The Brain and the Immune System

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Dahl, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 meni...

Image: Jeff Dahl | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of Virginia School of Medicine: Notable Alumni

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Dahl, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 Ha...

Image: Jeff Dahl | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of Virginia School of Medicine: Recent Turmoil and What You See From Above

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Dahl, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 resigne...

Image: Jeff Dahl | CC BY-SA 4.0