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 has made use of many facilities over the years. Older buildings still prominently standing include the Mayo Memorial Building and Jackson Hall. 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 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.
Academics
The University of Minnesota Medical School offers seven dual-degree programs for students interested in combining their medical education with a degree in medical research, public health, biomedical engineering, law, business, or health informatics. In addition to training medical students for their MD degrees the University of Minnesota Medical School also has numerous residencies as part of their graduate medical education programs. The larger of the two campuses is in the Twin Cities. This campus has approximately 170 students in each of the first two years of medical school with a mixture of traditional medical students and students pursuing combined advanced degrees such as a Ph.D. through a MSTP scholarship. As the larger of the two campuses, the Twin Cities campus provides increased opportunities for research and specialty care and also provides the main clinical education site for both campuses. Thus, at the end of the fourth year, the total graduating class at Minneapolis usually exceeds 220 students. The University of Minnesota Medical school makes use of many teaching hospitals in the Twin Cities area. The University of Minnesota Medical Center is just one of these; others include Hennepin County Medical Center, Regions Hospital, North Memorial Hospital, Children Hospital of Minneapolis and St Paul, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, and the Minneapolis Veteran's Administration Hospital. The Duluth campus, formerly the University of Minnesota DuluthSchool of Medicine, has approximately 60 students enrolled for each of the first two years of medical school. After that point, they are automatically transferred to the Twin Cities campus for their clinical rotations. The mission of the Duluth Campus is to select and educate students who will likely select Family Medicine/Primary Care and practice in rural locations. Duluth is also a primary site for the Center for American Indian and Minority Health which aims to educate increased numbers of Native American students as medical professionals. In May 2018, the University of Minnesota Medical School announced to establish an independent high-profile anti-aging research department in the university.
Rankings
In 2019, US News & World Report ranked the University of Minnesota Medical School 46th in the United States for medical research and 12th for primary care. A 2010 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found the University of Minnesota Medical School to be one of only two of 141 medical schools in the United States to be in the top quartile for NIH funding, output of primary care physicians, and social mission score.
