Medicine at Michigan magazine: Celebrating 175 years of the U-M Medical School

Letter from the Editors

Celebrating 175 years of excellence in medicine

Welcome to this special issue of Medicine at Michigan celebrating the demisemiseptcentennial of the University of Michigan Medical School. This issue is devoted entirely to our history and doesn’t include our regular departments. That means big news — like our new dean, Thomas J. Wang, M.D., and the opening of the new University of Michigan Health D. Dan and Betty Kahn Health Care Pavilion — will be covered in our next issue. Our Class Notes and In Memoriam sections will also be postponed until the first issue of 2026.

When we began to plan this special issue more than a year ago, we knew we wanted the focus to be on people. Our alumni and faculty have made this institution one of the premiere academic medical centers in the country. You are part of that story, too, and we hope as you peruse this issue, you feel a profound sense of pride in the remarkable contributions U-M has made to medicine.

How did we decide whom to feature? Our criteria were broad: we looked for clinicians and researchers who made positive contributions to U-M, to medicine in general, to their chosen field, or to their communities. We researched the history of the Medical School and sought input from historians, longtime Michigan Medicine staff, the Michigan Medicine Alumni Society, our colleagues in the Office of Development, professors at the Medical School, and others. Coming up with 175 people was easy — in fact,  we found many more.

The hard part was deciding on the final list, which is, admittedly, imperfect. We cheated a bit and put all 16 past deans under one number. Still, there were people we wanted to include who didn’t make it into the issue. If you notice someone missing who is important to you, we invite you to answer our back cover question (“Who did we miss?”).

Any celebration of our history would not be complete without acknowledging the less savory aspects of it. We’ve addressed some of those in “The wrong side of history,” p. 70. We felt it was important to acknowledge these issues, but we haven’t spent much space on them. This is a celebration, after all.

Most of the people in our history have done their best, not only for medicine but also for their communities and the patients of the future. What they’ve managed to accomplish — the life-changing and lifesaving impacts they’ve had on our world — is nothing short of extraordinary. We hope you enjoy learning about the small subset of this venerable group celebrated in these pages.

Here’s to another 175 years of transforming medicine!

Sincerely,

Katie Whitney and Lauren Talley
Editors

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