Upon his death in 1873, Quaker merchant Johns Hopkins bequested $7 million to build a hospital and university. This sum was unprecedented at the time. He wished for the new institution to uphold a threefold mission. It should produce superior physicians, seek knowledge to advance medicine, and administer free and excellent patient care. In 1889 the Johns Hopkins Hospital opened, followed by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine four years later. The medical school became the premier educational institution in the country and single-handedly raised the level of medical education in the United States. It instituted rigorous standards for admission and developed a new scientific curriculum. When the Flexner Report came out in 1910 and lambasted most medical schools in the United States, Johns Hopkins was lifted up as an ideal institution. In addition to being the premier medical school for much of its existence, it was the first to admit women, the first to use rubber gloves during surgery, the discoverer of Vitamin D, the first to develop CPR, the first to succeed at “blue baby” surgery, uncoverer of the natural opiates in the brain, researcher of many of the building blocks of genetic engineering, and a leader in numerous other areas.
- Neil Grauer, Leading the Way: A History of Johns Hopkins Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
- History of Johns Hopkins medicine, hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history
- JHU medical heritage, hopkinsortho.org/jhmi_history.html