birth defects. • We founded New York City’s first in vitro fertilization program. • NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital pioneered the use of Bubble CPAP or Continuous Positive Airway Pressure for newborns with respiratory distress syndrome. With Bubble CPAP therapy, pressurized oxygen is delivered through the baby’s nose, allowing continuous lung inflation. Babies breathe with assistance as opposed to a machine breathing for them. This low-tech therapy is performed minutes following birth to prevent chronic lung disease. The neonatal intensive care unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital is a recognized leader in this gentle, noninvasive technique and has one of the lowest chronic lung disease incidence rates in the world. • In 2014, a team of surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital saved the life of a two-week-old newborn using a 3-D printed model of the child’s heart as a guide for surgery on the child, who was born with complex heart defects, including many holes and malformations. With the aid of the 3-D model, the team was able to repair all of the heart’s defects in a single procedure. Typically, babies born with this complex form of congenital heart disease require a series of three or four life-threatening surgeries. • In 2014, we successfully delivered a baby whose mother was on a Left Ventricular Assist Device WHEN the Department of Med icine and Surgery was established in 1850, two outstanding scientific men were members of its faculty — Silas Hamilton Douglass (A.M. hon. Vermont ’47) and Abram Sager (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ’31, M.D. Castleton Medical College ’35, A.M. hon. Michigan ’52). With the aid of Regent Zina Pitcher, one of the most widely known physicians in the state, they had organized the department. In 1851, his last year as Regent, Pitcher was appointed Emeritus Professor of the Institutes of Medicine and Obstetrics. The position was purely honorary, however, and his appointment to it was apparently the University’s only record of any special interest he may have had in the teaching of obstetrics. Sager was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in January, 1848, with the understanding that he would also teach pharmacy and medical jurisprudence. By his own choice, in 1854, he was transferred to be Professor of Obstetrics and Physiology. Although there were discrepancies between the titles and duties of the other four medical professors, Sager’s title corresponded with his teaching responsibilities. Jonathan Adams Allen (Middlebury ’45, M.D. Castleton Medical College ’46), who had previously taught physiology, left the University in 1854, and Alonzo Benjamin Palmer (M.D. College of Physicians and Surgeons [N.Y.] ’39, A.M. hon. Nashville ’55, LL.D. Michigan ’81) was appointed Professor of Materia Medica and of the Diseases of Women and Children. While in charge of the teaching of gynecology, Palmer was closely associated with Zina Pitcher in efforts to improve medical education. From 1854 to 1858 Palmer was an editor of the Peninsular Journal of Medicine, of which, during about one-half of that time, Pitcher was the chief editor; and in the summers of 1857 and 1858 Palmer gave clinical lectures and bedside demonstrations before the University’s clinical classes in Detroit, which also were under Pitcher’s direction. In these classes a few normal and abnormal obstetrical cases were presented. Both men advocated the inclusion of adequate hospital training in the work required for the medical degree, but unlike Pitcher, Palmer at that time favored a plan — advanced by Professor Moses Gunn and emphatically rejected by the Regents in 1858-to move the entire Medical Department to Detroit. In 1860, when Palmer was placed in charge of the instruction in medicine and pathology, Sager was relieved of his work in physiology and resumed the teaching of women’s and children’s diseases. The six-year period which then ended was the only time in the history of the school when gynecology and obstetrics were not taught in the same department. One student has said that Sager, in lecturing, was inclined to become absorbed in general biology rather to the neglect of obstetrics, but from all accounts he was a conscientious, if not an eloquent, lecturer. By 1871-72 throughout the six-month session he was giving eight lectures a week, including those in obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics. Though a little clinical instruction in medicine and surgery was regularly provided throughout Sager’s period of service, first by means of free clinics before the students and later in the wards of the Hospital, clinical obstetrics in the University was 2 Obstetrics and Gynecology practically nonexistent, and gynecology also was taught largely by means of lecture and recitation. Ordinarily, neither Sager nor his successor performed more than the most minor operations; major surgery in this field, such as the removal of ovarian cysts, was the province of the professor of surgery. For nearly forty years medical students at the University of Michigan were graduated without having been required to witness a case of labor or a childbirth. Some ambitious and wide-awake students witnessed a few cases in the practice of their preceptors, but such instances were exceptional, for women naturally disliked having the students present, and it is to be doubted that even these students learned much about practical obstetrics, for at that period obstetrical manipulations were conducted under the sheet. The Hospital was opened in 1869. The financial principle on which it was established, namely, that it should be wholly selfsupporting, explains why the obstetrical material did not increase much for another twenty years, for, no matter how small the charge — and at first it included only food and medicines — women would not pay to be delivered by medical students, and the Michigan state laws authorizing the use of public moneys for the maintenance and transportation of those unable to pay had not yet been enacted. In fact, it was just as well in the days before antisepsis that the University could do so little work in clinical obstetrics, for at least one-half of the women confined in hospitals, such as Bellevue in New York City, died of puerperal sepsis. Although Semmelweiss in 1847 had proved conclusively that childbirth fever was transmitted by the contaminated hands of medical students, the medical profession as a whole either was ignorant of the fact or denied its truth. Scientific information spread slowly between 1850 and 1890. In Sager’s time surgery at the University was performed under great difficulties. In those days neglect of ordinary cleanliness before and during operations was not