by Bill Carey

After Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell announced his capital improvements budget last year, one of the least-noticed items was the planned renovation of a long-neglected structure next to the Howard School office building. Few people knew that the building was originally intended to be Galloway Hospital, which was supposed to be the medical facility affiliated with the Vanderbilt School of Medicine.

When the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, first organized Vanderbilt University in 1873, it didn't originally have a medical school component. However, before the University officially opened on the West End campus, its trustees negotiated with a faculty-owned-and-operated medical college that was, at that point, a department of the University of Nashville. This institution was located several blocks south of downtown on a hill that was then called "College Hill."

For a few decades, the medical school was jointly run by Vanderbilt and the University of Nashville. However, the University of Nashville had financial problems and ceased to exist by the turn of the century; parts of it splintered off into other institutions such as Montgomery Bell Academy and George Peabody College for Teachers. However, the Vanderbilt School of Medicine remained on the old University of Nashville campus even after the University of Nashville disbanded. At the turn of the century, the school held classes on the south campus and had a small hospital facility in a two-story stone building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Elm Street (which no longer exists).

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation sent Abraham Flexner on a national tour of medical schools. He was not especially impressed with the Vanderbilt School of Medicine, noting that it had virtually no admission requirements and poor laboratory facilities. However, he concluded that Vanderbilt was better positioned than Tennessee's other eight medical schools.

Largely because of Flexner's conclusion, the Carnegie Foundation in 1913 donated $1 million to improve the Vanderbilt School of Medicine staff and laboratory. That amount was not enough to build a new hospital, something the medical school also needed. However, this didn't appear to be a big problem at the time, because a new hospital to be called Galloway Memorial, funded by Nashville-area Methodist churches, was under construction on Vanderbilt's south campus starting in 1916. The proximity of the hospital to the Vanderbilt School of Medicine was not a coincidence; Vanderbilt Chancellor James Kirkland had urged the Methodists to build Galloway Hospital there so that the medical school could partner with it.

For a few years, Vanderbilt's partnership with Galloway Memorial appeared to be solidified. However, a couple of things changed by the time American troops came home after World War I. For one thing, Nashville's Methodist community was unable to come up with funds to finish Galloway. For another thing, Flexner left the Carnegie Foundation to work for the General Education Board, the foundation affiliated with philanthropist John Rockefeller. A third occurrence was the catastrophic influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed 20 million people worldwide and reminded Americans just how much needed to be done in the area of health care.

Largely under Flexner's influence, the GEB in 1919 announced it would give another $4 million to the Vanderbilt School of Medicine, the largest gift that had been made to the university at that time. With that amount pledged, Kirkland began to make new plans for medical school buildings on the south campus. He also hired a new dean named Canby Robinson.

Were it not for Robinson, Vanderbilt's School of Medicine probably would have spent the GEB's generous donation on the south campus. But from the moment he got to Nashville, Robinson was unhappy with the idea of the medical school being separate from the rest of the University, since medical school students also needed training in undergraduate subjects such as chemistry and biology. Robinson lobbied heavily for a new combined medical school and hospital to be built adjacent to the main Vanderbilt campus. This stance aggravated Kirkland, who felt obligated to use Galloway Memorial and who didn't think it would be appropriate to ask the Carnegie Foundation and GEB for more money.

However, Robinson was persistent, and even threatened to leave Vanderbilt if the campus weren't moved.

"I am unwilling to assume the responsibility for the care of patients in a hospital in which thorough modern medical practice cannot be carried out and for the teaching of students in a school that is inadequate in facilities and staff," he wrote to Kirkland in February 1921.

Eventually, Kirkland relented to Robinson, and in the spring of 1921, he made a formal request to both the Carnegie Foundation and the GEB for more money. To Kirkland's surprise, each promised an additional $1.5 million, bringing to a staggering $8 million the amount of money that the medical school had raised from the two foundations in just eight years.

Robinson and Boston architect Henry R. Shepley and Associates then got to work planning the new medical school, to be located along 21st Avenue. They came up with a design for a massive six-story, collegiate Gothic-style building that, from the air, resembled a large tic-tac-toe board. Medical school departments such as anatomy, radiology, biochemistry and physiology were given their own sections.

At the time, it was the only combined medical school and hospital under one roof in the United States, something Robinson believed would make treatment better. "There would be no separate laboratory buildings at Vanderbilt standing in lonely grandeur aloof from the daily work of a teaching hospital," author Timothy Jacobson later wrote in Making Medical Doctors: Science and Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner. "And there would be no ward or clinic not close enough to a laboratory so as to make the trek from bedside to bench easy and indeed obligatory."

The Vanderbilt Medical Center building broke ground in October 1923 and opened with great acclaim two years later (even though many Nashville residents were still upset about the University's abandonment of the south campus.) By that time, Robinson had brought in about a dozen new full-time professors to replace the part-time faculty that had been affiliated with the School of Medicine before that time. One of the few faculty members who survived the transition was Lucius Burch, former dean of the School of Medicine and grandfather of Nashville venture capitalist Lucius Burch III.

Today, Burch's grandson John Burch recalls how different medical education was when the Vanderbilt School of Medicine was located on the south campus. In those days, it was difficult for medical schools to obtain cadavers, in part because there were few laws set up that allowed people to donate their bodies to science, and in part because many people were opposed to the very idea of using corpses for research. John Burch, a financial consultant who was formerly head of the capital markets division for Equitable Securities, said his grandfather used to recount a story about a group of Nashville residents who got word that there was a cadaver inside the medical school building.

"My grandfather used to tell me that the mob of people came into the medical school looking for the cadaver, but they couldn't find it because they had hidden the body ...," he said.

Nashville's Methodist community was very upset with Vanderbilt's decision not to use the Galloway Hospital building, toward which many citizens had donated money. Galloway remained unfinished for two decades. Then, in the late 1930s, the city of Nashville bought it, finished it and turned it into a local government office building.

The migration of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine was a serious blow to the "College Hill" neighborhood and one from which it still hasn't recovered. Most of the people who lived in the area eventually left for other parts of town. The area immediately around the campus became zoned for light industrial use or became a part of Interstate 265 through South Nashville.

During the 1980s, pockets of the neighborhood became converted back to residential use. Today, the hill is known as "Rutledge Hill" or "Rolling Mill Hill" and is an area that Purcell hopes will become a fashionable urban neighborhood. Two of its key structures are the old Galloway Hospital, which Metro will soon renovate, and an unusual brick office building at 631 Second Avenue South. That structure, once a medical school facility called Litterer Laboratories , has the words "Vanderbilt University" carved into the archway above its entrance.

Bill Carey is a Vanderbilt alumnus, a writer for the Nashville Scene and author of Fortunes, Fiddles and Fried Chicken: A Nashville Business History.

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