Flower And Fifth Avenue Hospital

New York Medical College (NYMC or New York Med) is a private medical school in Valhalla, New York. Founded in 1860, it is a member of the Touro College and University System.

NYMC offers advanced degrees through its three schools: the School of Medicine (SOM), the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBMS) and the School of Health Sciences and Practice (SHSP). Total enrollment is 1,660 students (including 774 medical students) in addition to 800 residents and clinical fellows. NYMC employs 1,350 full-time faculty members and 1,450 part-time and voluntary faculty. The university has more than 12,000 alumni active in medical practice, healthcare administration, public health, teaching and research.

Part of the Touro College and University System since 2011, New York Medical College is located on a shared suburban 600-acre campus with its academic medical center, Westchester Medical Center (WMC) and the Maria Fareri Children's Hospital. Many of NYMC's faculty provide patient care, teach, and conduct research at WMC. New York Medical College's university hospital, Metropolitan Hospital Center, in the Upper East side neighborhood of Yorkville and East Harlem in Manhattan, has been affiliated with NYMC since it was founded in 1875, representing the oldest partnership between a hospital and a private medical school in the United States. Metropolitan is part of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the largest municipal hospital and healthcare system in the country.

With a network of 20+ affiliated hospitals in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and West Virginia, NYMC's hospital affiliations include large urban medical centers, small suburban clinics, rural medical centers and high-tech regional tertiary care facilities, where medical students and residents are afforded a wide variety of clinical training opportunities.

History

New York Medical College owes its founding in 1860 to a group of civic leaders who believed that medical studies should be practiced with a better understanding of what the patient needs. This group of civic leaders was led by the noted poet William Cullen Bryant who was an editor of the '' New York Evening Post''. Bryant was concerned about the condition of hospitals and medical education in New York City. His main concern was with some of the medical practices being used to treat disease, which at the time included bleedings, purges, and the administration of strong drugs in too large doses.

Interest in the medical field rapidly grew over the next few years due to the United States Civil War, which generated a major need for health related occupations. As a result, the college was founded and opened as the Homeopathic Medical College of the State of New York on the corner of 20th Street and Third Avenue, near Union Square in Manhattan. In the first semester there were 59 students and 8 professors. The college adopted the name New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1869 and, in 1887, New York Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital.

The sister institution known as the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women was founded a few years later in 1863 by Clemence Lozier. In 1867, it graduated Emily Stowe, the first female physician to practice in Canada. Three years later in 1870, Susan McKinney Steward graduated as the first African-American female physician in New York State. One of its later graduates, Adelaide Wallerstein in the class of 1905, also held a law degree, and founded the East Side Clinic for Children in 1906. When the Women's College closed in 1918, its students transferred to New York Medical College.

In 1875, Metropolitan Hospital Center opened as a municipal facility on Ward's Island, staffed largely by the faculty of New York Medical College. As a university hospital of New York Medical College, this relationship is among the nation's oldest continuing affiliations between a private medical school and a public hospital.

Built by New York Medical College in 1889, the Flower Free Surgical Hospital, was the first teaching hospital in the United States to be owned by a medical college. It was constructed at York Avenue and 63rd Street with funds given largely by Congressman Roswell P. Flower, later governor of New York. In 1908 the college changed its name to New York Homeopathic Medical College and Flower Hospital. In 1928 the college was the first medical school in the nation to establish a minority scholarship program. By 1935, the college had transferred its outpatient activities to the Fifth Avenue Hospital at Fifth Avenue and 106th Street. The college (including Flower Hospital) and Fifth Avenue Hospital merged in 1938 and became New York Medical College, Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals.

In 1972, New York Medical College moved to Valhalla, at the invitation of the Westchester County government, which desired to build an academic medical center. Completed in 1977, Westchester Medical Center is currently the main academic medical center of the college. The college became affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York in 1978, which helped provide financial stability and also established a shared commitment for the public good in the area of health care and the health sciences. The college recognized itself in the Catholic tradition and affiliated with several Catholic hospitals. When Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital closed in 1979, the remaining operations of New York Medical College were transferred to the Valhalla campus. The college shortened its name to New York Medical College in 1982.

In 2010, the NYMC community celebrated the 150th anniversary of the founding of NYMC with a year full of sesquicentennial celebration activities. In that same year, it was announced that Touro College, a Jewish-sponsored institution in Manhattan had reached an agreement to assume the sponsorship role for New York Medical College from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. In a ceremony held at Bryant Park in New York City on May 25, 2011, New York Medical College officially joined the Touro College and University System creating one of the largest health sciences universities in the country. New York Medical College embraces its unique history in having been a secular institution to an institution in the Roman Catholic tradition, to now being part of a Jewish-sponsored institution of higher education.

In 2011, St. Joseph's Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey

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