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ABSTRACT The year 2010 marked the centennial of the Rockefeller University Hospital, one of the great philanthropic achievements of 20th-century science. For 100 years, the Hospital played a central role in the development and growth of medical science by enabling physician-scientists to make intensive study of human biology and disease.With ingenuity and devotion, they greatly enriched clinical medicine as well as basic biological science.This account emphasizes the founding and first half-century of the Hospital as it became a germinal center for clinical investigation.The second half of the century saw rapid change in medicine and health care with vexing problems, many yet unsolved.This history should serve as a call to arms for maintaining the linkage of science and medicine, supporting patient-oriented research as a basic discipline of medicine.
An Observation Post Among the Sick
The Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City was founded on the hypothesis that direct contact with illness is a strong force in igniting the curiosity and energy that can, from time to time, lead to great leaps in our understanding of human biology and disease.This was repeatedly proven at the Hospital, a special locale where the "prepared minds" of physicians uncovered new facts that often led to effective treatments. It is neither a hospital nor a laboratory, but a hospital-laboratory, which celebrated its 100th birthday in 2010.
Although this was a first for America, the idea had been in the minds of European and British physician-investigators from the late 19th century onward. Sir Thomas Lewis (1934), a British pioneer of clinical investigation,made a forceful statement in support of in-hospital research by physicians:
It is essential that those who have held charge of patients and have studied phenomena in the living should themselves, and not through skilled deputies, explore the tissue changes that may underlie disturbed function. . . .To divide or attempt to divide medical research into ward research and laboratory research is narrow and harmful; it is a profound error to believe that there is any essential difference in general method, however different may be the technique.The close union of the two maintains throughout the work both the full perspective of the central problem in its practical bearings, and the inspiration that should drive...