Medical School
Bennett Medical School class, 1913
Credit: Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections
The university's second professional school, medicine, was initiated in 1909 during the presidency of the Rev. Alexander Burrowes, S.J.
It began with the merger of Reliance Medical School and the Illinois Medical College with Bennett Medical School, which was named after the prominent English physician John Hughes Bennett, whose contributions to the advancement of medicine were manifold. Bennett Medical School affiliated with Loyola.
So well did Loyola's new medical school train aspiring physicians that in 1911 its graduates attained perfect marks in the examinations for internships at the famed Cook County Hospital. This marked the first record of 100 percent scores for a medical school in the history of medical education in Chicago.
The faculty of the school included such distinguished physicians as Dr. Samuel Salinger, director of the department of Otolaryngology, who in the period before World War I became the first recognized specialist in the Chicago area in plastic surgery of the ear, nose, and throat.
Another remarkable physician was Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen who was the first woman to be appointed chairman and professor of Obstetrics at Loyola's Medical School. Her appointment was made in 1919. She was the first and only woman physician to present papers at the 16th International Congress of Medicine in Budapest, Hungary, and at the Pan-American International Association meeting in Panama. She was also the first of her sex to be made an honorary fellow of the Internaional College of Surgeons, and was elected in 1915 the first President of the Medical Women's National Association, now called The American Medical Women's Association.
A pioneer in the use of x-ray and radium treatment was Dr. Henry Schmitz, Sr., who was head of the department of Gynecology from 1919 to 1939. His early interest in the field of radiology resulted in high honors from both the Radiology Society of North America, and the American Radium Society.