University Hospital celebrates half-century anniversary

The opening of University Hospital 50 years ago supposedly put to rest a long-simmering battle between Columbia and Kansas City as to which city would house Missouri’s four-year medical school.

But the issue surfaced again in 2003, when the curators brought up the idea of moving the medical school to Kansas City as a hypothetical possibility. Dr. Hugh Stephenson saw it as the latest development in a century-long discussion that began in the early 1900s.

“The controversy’s been going on since the turn of the century—not this recent century but the century before,” Stephenson said. “It flared up again in 1910 and in the 1920s. It got hot in the 1930s, and then in the 1950s, it really got hot.”

Stephenson was there when University Hospital opened its doors Sept. 16, 1956, and when it held its official dedication Nov. 10 that same year. The Missouri General Assembly had voted to start the four-year medical school in Columbia in 1952 and had appropriated $13.6 million to construct the hospital and training facilities for physicians and nurses.

“The state has really gotten its money’s worth at $13 million for a hospital and medical school,” Stephenson said. “Today we couldn’t even put in air conditioning for that price.”

A former curator, a distinguished professor emeritus of surgery and the author of the definitive history of MU medicine, Aesculapius Was a Mizzou Tiger, Stephenson came to the university in 1953, as a professor and then chairman of the department of surgery. Born and raised in Columbia, and known for inventing the “crash cart” mobile cardiac resuscitation unit, Stephenson was eager to see the university begin its new four-year medical program and build University Hospital on land that had once been the university golf course. In the ‘50s, military barracks left over from World War II still occupied the land on which the hospital would sit.

The Columbia medical school/hospital was not a done deal; it was touch and go, Stephenson said. After committee hearings in the Missouri House of Representatives, the members voted three to two in favor of the Columbia location over Kansas City. The Columbia location passed the House by only one vote, and the Senate’s vote was also close, he said.

Stephenson said the main reason for building the medical school here was to take advantage of the opportunity for collaboration with other allied sciences already on campus. The cross-pollination of research among disciplines was, and still is, the chief benefit of having the medical school in Columbia, he said. At Mizzou, medical researchers could team up with faculty from the 20 other schools and colleges, particularly in fields such as biochemistry, veterinary medicine, engineering, the research reactor and even journalism.

The recent opening of the new Life Sciences Building, and groundbreakings for the renovation and addition to the new Schweitzer Hall Biochemistry Complex last month and the new International Institute for Nano and Molecular Medicine this month, are just the latest examples of this ongoing trend for researchers to collaborate across disciplines. If Gov. Matt Blunt’s MOHELA proposal passes, the medical school will receive an $85 million infusion of funds, allowing it to build the projected Health Sciences Research and Education Center. Building the new center would allow the medical school to complete the vision of its founders 50 years ago and would fulfill a dream for Stephenson.

Locating the medical school in Columbia assured a more rural focus to the school, he said, because the Kansas City medical program aimed more at producing doctors for the city. “I think history has shown it to be a great success,” he said. “Our rural mission has been terrifically successful with clinics all over the state.”

The medical school has produced more than 6,300 physicians, 2,300 of whom practice in Missouri. “In the past 50 years, MU’s medical center has provided complex patient care and physician training for Missouri, especially for rural areas of the state,” said William M. Crist, dean of the MU School of Medicine and an alumnus whose research is credited for significantly increasing the survival rate for children with cancer. “But the best is yet to come. We are in the process of significantly strengthening medical research at MU.”

The medical school brought large numbers of employees to Columbia, Stephenson said, and has provided the population with more doctors per capita than any city in the United States except Rochester, Minn. It also attracted many medical organizations, such as the American Heart Association, and related medical institutions that had once only been located in other cities.

One such institution is the Harry S Truman V.A. Hospital. Until MU had a four-year medical school in place, the Veterans Administration would not consider locating a hospital in Columbia. Columbia’s hospital was approved in the 1960s with help from former President Harry Truman and was eventually built in 1972.

Stephenson performed the first open-heart surgery in the area at University Hospital in 1958. The patient was a 7-year-old girl from Cainsville, Mo. Dr. Jack Curtis performed the first heart transplant in the area in 1989, on a 53-year-old man from Thayer, Mo.

Another area breakthrough—not as glamorous, but just as significant—came in 1968, when University Hospital introduced the first ambulance to town. Although the military had used ambulances since at least World War I, civilians had access to them only in major cities. The new ambulances with life-saving equipment gave trauma patients a better chance of survival on their way to the hospital.

Prior to their introduction, local trauma patients were transported to the hospital via hearse, a fact that symbolizes how far medicine has come in Columbia over the last 50 years.