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Two Hundred Years of Medicine at Dartmouth
By Barbara Blough and Dana Cook Grossman
Nathan Smith's "New Medical House," buil in 1811, served as Dartmouth Medical School's primary building for more than 150 years. |
Dixi Crosby, an 1824 graduate of DMS, established Hanover's first hospital and ran it until his retirement in 1870. |
For 13 years, Nathan Smith carried the full burden of planning, administration, and teaching; then, in 1810, the Trustees hired a second faculty member. With a little breathing room, Smith turned his attention to upgrading the level of medical training. In 1812, he revised the curriculum and qualified the School to award the M.D. degree in place of only a bachelor of medicine, following Harvard in this move by one year.
This achievement was essentially the last in Smith's extraordinary career at Dartmouth. He left in 1813 to play a role in the founding of a medical school at Yale, returned briefly in 1816, and left again to help found two more medical schools-at Bowdoin and the University of Vermont. He died in 1829, a legend in his own time. Described by William Welch as "one of the most interesting and important figures in American medicine," Smith has also been called "the Johnny Appleseed of American medicine" for his unmatched role in the establishment of no less than four medical schools.
Most of the faculty who followed Smith were former students of his, including, in 1838, Dr. Dixi Crosby, a multitalented dynamo who gave the community its first hospital, a converted house on College Street called simply "Dr. Dixi's Hospital." Another new arrival in 1838 was the eminent poet-physician, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who during his two years on the Dartmouth faculty introduced the study of histology and the use of the stethoscope to the U.S. medical curriculum.
Unlike Holmes, who returned to Boston in 1840, Dr. Crosby spent his entire career in Hanover. When he retired in 1870, his hospital closed, leaving a void that was not filled for 23 years. He had, however, established a new level in the interrelationship between patient care and teaching.
Carlton Pennington Frost, an 1857 graduate of DMS, was instrumental in the establishment of Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. |
Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, one of the nation's first hospitals designed on the pavilion plan, opened with 36 beds in 1893. |
Dr. Frost not only brought the School abreast of the times academically but was largely responsible for founding Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. Shortly after Dr. Dixi's Hospital closed, Frost and his faculty formed the Dartmouth Hospital Association and set about acquiring land and funding. It was 19 years, however, before Frost persuaded his friend Hiram Hitchcock, a wealthy New York hotelier with a home in Hanover, to underwrite the project. Finished in 1893, the thoroughly modern 36-bed hospital was one of the first in the country built on the pavilion plan and was, from the beginning, intimately associated with the Medical School and its teaching program.
A few years later, a significant contribution to American medicine emerged from Hanover. In February of 1896, just weeks after Wilhelm Roentgen had broadcast to the world the word of his discovery of x-rays, the first diagnostic use of the new technology in America was made in a laboratory at Dartmouth by Dr. Gilman Frost and his physicist brother, Edwin-both of them sons of Carlton.
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