SESQUICENTENNIAL SPONSORSHIP PACKET
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEHARRY MEDICAL COLLEGE
The idea of Meharry Medical College began more than 150 years ago because of an act of kindness. In the 1830s, a young man with a wagon load of salt found himself and his cargo mired on a country road, and, as fate would have it, he was rescued by a family of freed slaves who took him in for the night and helped him free the wagon the next day to set him on his way. As he turned to leave, he told his benefactors, “I have no money, but when I can I shall do something for your race.” The young man was 16-year-old Samuel Meharry. And decades later, after the nation had split and healed from a civil war with multitudes of newly freed slaves intertwined in the fabric of the country, Samuel and his brothers, now well established in life, took up their duty based on Samuel’s promise and gave $15,000—at the time quite a generous sum—for the founding of a medical school as part of Central Tennessee College, a Methodist chartered college for freedmen. The medical school opened in 1876 as the first of its kind in the South for Blacks. It received a separate charter in 1915 as Meharry Medical College, and, among other programs, opened a dental school in 1886 followed by a nursing school in 1901. A survivor of the 1910 Flexnor Report, Meharry was one of two Black medical schools (Howard was the other) to continue forward. Across the decades, Meharry adapted as a trainer of health care professionals. Graduates of the college formed the National Medical Association, established hospitals across the nation, and distinguished themselves in their respective careers. Programs at the College closed and others thrived, but Meharry Medical College succeeded as a major provider of African Americans in the U.S. health care workforce. The College added a School of Graduate Studies in 1938, adding a master of science program in 1947, a Ph.D. program in 1972, an M.D./Ph.D. program in 1982 and a physician assistant science program in 2023. As one of four historically Black health sciences centers in the U.S.—numbered with Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science—Meharry Medical College is a leading national educator of African Americans with M.D. and D.D.S. degrees and Ph.D. degrees in the biomedical sciences. Nearly a third of Black practicing dentists in the U.S. are Meharry graduates.
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