Tulane University’s Medical School has had many homes over the last 192 years. According to Tulane Health Services’ history of the school, three local physicians founded the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834. With no place to call home, the first classes took place in January 1835 at the Strangers Unitarian Church at St. Charles and Gravier. A fire destroyed the church in the early 1850s.
For the next few years, the school moved from place to place, often holding classes in private homes and at Charity Hospital. That is until 1844 when it found a permanent location at what is today University Place and Common St.
Surprisingly, many local physicians were not so enthusiastic about the new medical school. Dr. A.E. Foster noted that resistance in his 1935 history of medical education in New Orleans.
“Despite the strong opposition of a large number of the most influential members of the local profession,” he wrote, “the organizers of the medical college, with undaunted determination, persisted in their efforts, which were eventually crowned with success.”
With that growing success, the small upstart college went public in 1845 when the Louisiana Legislature created the University of Louisiana and the Medical College of Louisiana. Two years later, the college moved again, this time to a larger building on Common St. between Baronne and University Place. All of these previous buildings are long gone.
Then along came the New Jersey-born New Orleans merchant and philanthropist Paul Tulane who donated over $350,000 in 1882 to the University of Louisiana. In return, the college became a private institution in 1884 and renamed Tulane University in his honor.
In 1893 the medical school was on the move again when it relocated to its new home in the 1500 block of Canal St. between N. Robertson and N. Villere. Seen here in 1900, the new campus building was designed by famed architect Thomas Sully and named for the college’s former dean, Tobias Richardson.
But what’s in a name. Shortly after the turn of the century, a new benefactor, Alexander Hutchinson, stepped up to finance construction of several new buildings on Tulane’s uptown campus. The gift also included renovations to the Richardson building on Canal. With that, the Richardson building got a new name — the Josephine Hutchinson Memorial Building. Not to forget Dean Richardson, however, Tulane attached his name to one of its new buildings on its Uptown campus.
In 1930, the medical school moved again, this time from its relatively new Canal Street campus, which was demolished in the late 1930s, to the new Hutchinson Memorial Building on Tulane Avenue across LaSalle St. from Charity Hospital. Today, Tulane’s School of Medicine and its affiliated departments and centers occupy a number of buildings in and around the 1400 block of Tulane Avenue.
