In addition to improving medical care in Brooklyn, they hoped the medical school would challenge Manhattan’s status as the only modern city in the area. The founding fathers saw two advantages to this. Thus it became the first American teaching hospital.
#One medical cobble hill series#
In contrast, LICH combined required series of medical lectures with practice in the adjacent hospital. If they were ambitious, they might also attend some lectures on the science behind the practice, but these were not required, and people living outside city centers had little access to formal lectures. aspiring practitioners still learned their craft through apprenticeships with established doctors.
Some European medical practices–most prominently, in Paris and Vienna–were beginning to experiment with teaching hospitals, but in the U.S.
To us it seems logical that medical schools partner with hospitals so that medical students can practice on real human bodies, but in the 1850s that was a radical idea. The name signaled a major breakthrough for American medical practice. John’s Hospital, then The Long Island Hospital and Medical College, by 1858 it was formally referred to as The Long Island College Hospital. In 1857 the doctors who had organized the Dispensary partnered with a group of prominent Brooklyn businessmen to develop a hospital and medical school in the neighborhood. The Dispensary met a real need: it treated 850 patients in its first 19 months, and it soon outgrew both its quarters and its founders’ ambitions. Located at 132 Court St, it boasted two consulting physicians, two consulting surgeons, one resident physician, and one “cupper and leecher.” According to Smith’s Brooklyn City Directory, 1856-1857, the Dispensary was “Open to the poor from 2 to 4 o’clock every day, Sunday excepted.” The Brooklyn German General Dispensary went a little farther than that it also had wards for in-patient treatment.
In the mid-19th century a “dispensary” was what we would call a clinic–an office staffed by doctors who diagnosed illnesses and “dispensed” medicines. It was first organized in March, 1856, as the Brooklyn German General Dispensary–“German” because its major sponsors were German doctors concerned that there be medical care for the large number of German immigrants then living in the neighborhood. We know LICH as the large complex on the northwest corner of Cobble Hill–currently the site of a power struggle between developers and the community. As LICH disappears, I thought we might look back at its history, a bit of our collective “memory” of a substantial piece of Cobble Hill’s past. (I also miss the fact that at 5 pm, when shifts changed, I just might be able to find a parking spot.) If all goes as planned, few newcomers will be aware that a vibrant hospital once stood on this site. I miss the doctors and nurses scurrying past I miss the linguistic jangle and ethnic mosaic that the hospital brought to our increasingly homogeneous neighborhood. The Rise and Fall of LICH: America’s First Teaching Hospitalīecause I walk past The Long Island College Hospital site every day, I’ve watched the busy institution as it slowed down, then closed.
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