School of Medicine Affiliation with NYC Health + Hospitals/ Metropolitan Still Going Strong
For nearly 150 years, faculty and students have proudly served and trained on Metropolitan’s wards, with some notable firsts and honorable achievements. BY NICHOLAS WEBB, MSIS, AND LORI PERRAULT
I
n 1875, Metropolitan Hospital opened as a charity institution on Ward’s Island under the supervision of New York Medical College (NYMC) and the New York City municipal hospital system. Physicians were rowed across the East River with its often-hazardous currents to care for patients. Several wars, financial crises, epidemics and pandemics later, NYMC faculty and students continue to serve the sick there. Today, the affiliation between NYC Health + Hospitals/ Metropolitan and NYMC remains the longest-running affiliation between a municipal hospital and a medical school in the United States.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern scientific medicine was still in its infancy. Homeopathy was an active competitor to traditional allopathic medicine, which had only recently abandoned its reliance on therapies such as purging and bloodletting. Many of New York City’s most prominent families were patrons of the homeopaths who served on the faculty of NYMC. However, the wards at Bellevue, New York’s flagship 32
C H I R O N I A N 2021 – 2022
municipal hospital, were closed to homeopathic physicians. These supporters of homeopathy petitioned the mayor to establish a homeopathic municipal hospital, and in 1875, the Ward’s Island Homeopathic Hospital opened in a building that had previously housed the New York Inebriate Asylum. The 1880s and 1890s were a time of dramatic change in medicine. New York City was growing rapidly under the influence of industrialization and immigration and the hospital reflected that. In 1894, the Ward’s Island Homeopathic Hospital moved to Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island, occupying a group of buildings that had previously been the New York City Asylum for the Insane. The distinctive octagonal tower at the center of this complex, designed and built in 1839, still stands today on the north end of Roosevelt Island. As part of its move from Ward’s Island to the new location, the hospital changed its name. The word “homeopathic” was dropped and the hospital became known as the Metropolitan Hospital under the guidance of two leading figures on
Metropolitan’s medical board: Egbert Guernsey, M.D., and A.K. Hills, M.D. Drs. Guernsey and Hills were prominent physicians actively working towards the reconciliation of homeopathy with mainstream medicine. They kept pace with the new discoveries in modern medical science, trained their students in both homeopathic and allopathic remedies and urged their fellow homeopaths to abandon their sectarian identity and unite with the mainstream medical profession. In 1894, the year of the move, Dr. Hills became the first homeopathic M.D. to be admitted as a fellow to the New York Academy of Medicine.
EXPANSION ON THE HORIZON Over the next sixty years, as New York City continued to expand to form the modern city of five boroughs, Metropolitan Hospital grew to become one of the largest and most active hospitals in the municipal hospital system. At first, patients and staff traveled to the hospital by steamship across the East River. When the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909, it included an elevator in one of its pylons to carry hospital visitors to ground level.
