Temple University School of Medicine - Skull Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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SAMAR ITAN TICSRITAL €f TEMPLE UNIVERSITY J. O. Arnold M. D., F. A. C. S. J| UST as the School of Medicine has come to he a most outstanding unit of Temple r University, so has the Samaritan Hospital long been a large part of the School of Medicine. Needless to say that as the institution prepares to meet the challenge to higher standards and greater achievements, this relationship of school and hospital must necessarily become more and more intimate—in body as well as in spirit, until ultimately there shall be one great combining structure, as there is now one great increasing purpose. But the province of this page is to review the past rather than to reveal the future. So far as wc can find a definite starting point, that which later became the Samaritan Hospital, had its inception in a little group of physicians calling themselves the North Philadelphia Medical Society, who, in 1889-90, rented an old building (since destroyed) at 3- 20 North Broad Street, fitted it up with a dispensary, a few beds, and a nurse or two, and called it the North Philadelphia Hospital. Inside of a year this undertaking had failed for want of financial support. In the latter part of 1891 an appeal was made to the popular church and college organizer, Russell H. Conwell, to reorganize this little hospital and to take charge of its management. This he did, and in a few months moved it to a brick dwelling, the second house north of Ontario Street, on the east side of Broad Street. This building was purchased January 18th, 1892, and twelve days later was appropriately dedicated and formally opened as the Samaritan Hospital, and placed in charge of an entirely new medical statf. In 1893 the state granted a charter to this new hospital. Like Dr. ConwelPs undertakings generally, this one was immediately popular and successful. The rapidly increasing demand for bods made enlargements necessary almost from the start. A rear annex, and other building modifications were made in 1896, increasing the bed capacity from twenty to forty-three, and two years later, a further expansion took in the twin dwelling at the corner of Ontario Street. In 1901 the chief men on the staff were Dr. Frank Haehnlen on obstetrics and gynecology; Drs. Samuel Wolfe, James M. Anders, and Howard S. Anders on medicine: Drs. Ernest La Place, H. C. Deaver, John A. Boger, and Levi J. Hammond, on surgery: and Dr. G. Oram Ring on ophthalmology. The first state aid for building purposes was granted in 1901, and one story of the central administration building, and a three story north wing were completed in 1903. Aho t this time the staff was aga'n r.organized owing to the recent affiliation f the l.c.p tai v.itl: Temple's new medical school.

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In these years the ever-broadening field of medicine has necessitated many changes and additions in equipment, in curriculum and personnel. The faculty of eighty teachers was almost doubled in number, and has “grown with its growth, and strengthened with its strength. The annually lengthening roll of graduates has now reached more than six hundred, and the number of disappointed applicants turned away in a single year is larger than the sum-total of graduates turned out in the whole history of the school. But these few facts and figures fall far short of telling the story of the past twenty years. There have been achievements more signal and significant than anything that can be measured by dates and years, and mounting numbers. It is no part of this brief sketch to attempt to define “that subtle something that spells success. Suffice it to say that in this eventful double decade the ebb and flow of the tide of “Temple's” fortunes have finally brought to culmination the third great step in the history of her medical school. When on June 14, 1928, a class of fifty-one graduates bore forth their Alma Mater's banner, for the first time in its history, “now full high .advanced to equal rank with the greatest schools of the land, a prophetic Founder's dream had come true, and a courageous new President's ambition had begun to be realized. Thus is the story of yesterday, merged into the glory of today, but “into today already walks tomorrow, and on Temple’s “broadening horizons there looms even now the towering new Medical College that will mark a still more glorious epoch in the school's history, the story of which, in some future day, some other Skull must swell with the pride of its telling. Eighteen

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Samaritan Hospital