What began in 1828 as the Medical Academy of Georgia, a seven-student, three-teacher operation in the old City Hospital of Augusta, is now the sprawling Medical College of Georgia.
It provides five schools: Allied Health Sciences, Dentistry, Graduate Studies, Medicine and Nursing, plus more than 40 undergraduate and graduate programs.
Students and applicants for fall 2001 saw 1,939 total residents and 426 total applicants for fall 2001.
It heals as well as it teaches.
Medical College of Georgia Hospital is a 650-bed facility built as a teaching and statewide referral hospital for the medical school.
The hospital provides a large number of services not otherwise available locally, along with highly advanced medical care for all of Georgia.
It affords maximum opportunity for learning for more than 450 residents in the areas of anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, family practice, general surgery, internal medicine, neurology, neurosurgery, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopaedic surgery, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, pathology, pediatrics, plastic surgery, psychiatry and urology, in addition to numerous subspecialty fellowships.
The latest in high technology is used at MCG Hospital to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and to improve patients' quality of life. The hospital was the first in the area to use MRI as a diagnostic tool and has the capability to provide Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation for critically ill infants. Advanced specialization in the critical care setting is reflected in the hospital's eight intensive care units, including surgery, neurosurgery and shock-trauma.
MCG Hospital serves as the regional trauma center for the Central Savannah River Area. It was the first hospital in Georgia to receive that designation.
All this is in Augusta today, but the school was almost located in Savannah.
Historians point out that Augusta physicians in the early 1800s were more interested in getting the school than their counterparts downstream.
Those physicians, led by Milton Antony, saw their determination rewarded, and in 1833 the Medical Institute of Georgia conferred its first doctor of medicine degrees on four graduates.
The institute was renamed the Medical College of Georgia later that year and moved to Telfair Street in 1835.
The medical school closed for four years during the Civil War. It established a tenuous affiliation with the University of Georgia in 1873 and came under fire in 1909 when a Carnegie Foundation survey of medical education recommended that MCG be closed or moved to the university's campus in Athens.
But the school remained open, affiliating more closely with the university in 1911. Two years later, students came back from Christmas vacation to find their classrooms and laboratories had been moved to 13th Street and Walton Way, the current site of University Hospital.
MCG faced more trouble in 1933, when the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia voted to close the school. But Georgia Speaker of the House and Augusta native Roy V. Harris spearheaded a campaign to keep MCG open - a movement that eventually persuaded the board to reverse its vote.
"There was rejoicing in Richmond County that its old medical school had been snatched from the jaws of death," the late Phinizy Spalding wrote in his 1987 history of MCG.
MCG's existence has been secure for the most part since that Depression-era threat, and the school has continued to be innovative. It opened Eugene Talmadge Memorial Hospital in 1956. The state's nursing program moved there from Athens the same year.
MCG has opened numerous other clinics and programs in the years since.
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