University of Minnesota Medical School

The University of Minnesota Medical School is an accredited medical school at the University of Minnesota. It is a combination of two campuses located in Minneapolis and Duluth, Minnesota. History The University of Minnesota Medical School began in the late nineteenth century when three of the private medical schools in the Twin Cities in Minnesota offered up their charters and merged their programs to form the University of Minnesota Medical School. A fourth school was absorbed in the early twentieth century. As a consequence of these mergers in 1888 and 1908, the school is the only medical school in the Twin Cities or Duluth and is one of only two in the state, the other being the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. The University of Minnesota Medical School's older buildings include the Mayo Memorial Building (1954) and Jackson Hall (1912). Jackson Hall was built as the home of the Institute of Anatomy and is still the site of anatomy instruction for medical students, undergraduates, and students of dentistry, nursing, physical therapy, and mortuary science. More visible today are the 1978 Phillips-Wangensteen and Moos Tower buildings. A new university hospital overlooking the river was completed in 1986. The university began its partnership with Fairview Health Services in 1997, bringing the university hospital under Fairview operations and eventually moving pediatrics to the West Bank. In 2011, a new pediatric hospital was opened. The M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital provides pediatric programs from surgery, imaging and neonatal and pediatric intensive care to cardiac and oncology (cancer care) services and blood and marrow and organ transplantation. The Duluth program began in late 1972. It is now a branch campus of the medical school, specializing in the training of physicians for rural and small-town settings in rural Minnesota. The University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth Campus is ranked #2 in the nation for training American Indian and Alaskan Indian physicians, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Students spend their first two years on the Duluth campus before transferring down to the Twin Cities class for rotations and clinical lessons.