: Health Hinge

Georgios Papanikolaou (1883-1962) - inventor of the Pap Smear
Robert C. Atkins (M.D. ‘55) The Atkins Diet
Anthony Fauci (M.D. ‘66) - Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health
Wilson Greatbatch (B.E.E. ‘50) - inventor of the cardiac pacemaker
Henry Heimlich (M.D. ‘43) - promoter of the abdominal thrust (Heimlich maneuver)
Robert W. Holley (Ph.D. ‘47) - co-recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing the genetic code and how it operates in protein synthesis.
C. Everett Koop (M.D. ‘41) - former Surgeon General
Lieutenant General Dr. James Peake (M.D. ‘76) is the current Secretary of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.
Benjamin Spock (Residency in pediatrics, ‘31, and in psychiatry ‘33) - author, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
Henry Masur (M.D.’72, Internship, Residency Internal Medicine) - First description of AIDS in New England Journal of Medicine; described New York City patient cohort; article appeared with matching article from a group describing a similar cohort in San Francisco.
Ida S. Scudder (M.D. 1899, Medical Missionary in India; Founder of Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu)

While similar to other medical schools, Weill Cornell is different in some important respects. Weill Cornell’s administrative connections are complex. Its primary teaching hospital is New York-Presbyterian Hospital, which has two medical centers: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. Unlike many similar efforts, the Hospital merger has not only led to the reduction of administrative redundancy but has strengthened academic programs on both campuses.

In addition to its affiliations with New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Sloan-Kettering Institute, and Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell is the academic center for the Hospital for Special Surgery, which lies across the street and The Methodist Hospital in Houston, a hospital which had been — until 2004 — the primary private teaching hospital for Baylor College of Medicine.

Weill Cornell has also opened the first American medical school to be located outside of U.S. borders. The Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar opened for instruction in 2004. Its facilities are found in Education City, Qatar near Doha. The Qatar campus offers a six-year integrated medical education program primarily focused on patient care. Weill Cornell has also been actively involved in the development of the Weill Bugando Medical College in Mwanza, Tanzania. [[1]]

New York-Presbyterian Hospital is a member of the Planetree Alliance, a nonprofit association of health-care institutions set up to promote practices to make patients less intimidated and more comfortable with the health care they receive.

The medical college is currently located at 1300 York Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, along with the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. It was partially endowed by Sanford Weill.

The Sloane Hospital for Women is the obstetrics and gynecology service within New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.

Sloane Maternity Hospital was founded in 1886 based upon a donation from William D. Sloane and his wife, Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane, the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, to Columbia P&S. It was the first hospital in New York devoted to women’s healthcare. It was located on the P&S campus in Midtown Manhattan at Amsterdam Avenue and 59th Street, serving as a teaching facility for P&S students, and opened its doors in early 1888. It soon established a reputation for superior sanitary practices and low mortality rates; it also linked obstetrics with gynecology, the first hospital in the country to do so. The facility changed its name to Sloane Hospital for Women in 1910. In 1911, a new surgical building was added, also funded by the Sloanes.[1] In 1925, it became part of Presbyterian Hospital, which was operating in affiliation with P&S. During 1928, it moved to its present location on 168th Street in the Washington Heights area of northern Manhattan.[2] There it maintained its branding while occupying several floors of the Presbyterian Hospital building.

In its role as both a research and clinical facility, the Sloane Hospital for Women has pioneered many advances in the field, including the Apgar score, the use of rhogam, and amniocentesis.

In February 1915, an outbreak of typhoid occurred among twenty-five nurses and attendants in the hospital, two of whom later died. The outbreak was later traced to Typhoid Mary, who had violated an agreement she had made with the city not to return to the cooking profession.

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At his death in 1927, Payne Whitney bestowed the funds to build and endow the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (PWC) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. An eight story free-standing hospital, it was immediately affiliated with Cornell University’s medical school (now Weill Cornell Medical College) and with the New York Hospital (now New York-Presbyterian Hospital), both of which are adjacent to PWC.

Payne Whitney was a large donor to the Hospital and Medical College, and it has been an issue of long speculation why he chose a psychiatric building to be his primary naming opportunity at New York-Cornell. Whatever the reason, Payne Whitney has been synonymous with the best of clinical psychiatric care for many decades. The poet Robert Lowell wrote of his hospitalization at Payne Whitney, Marilyn Monroe was hospitalized there in early 1961, and Mary McCarthy based her book, The Group, on her inpatient experience.

The building itself was torn down in the early 1990s to make way for an expansion of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital over the FDR Drive. Since that time, all clinical and research services at the two primary Cornell psychiatric campuses—in Manhattan and in White Plains, New York—have been named after Payne Whitney. The clinic also has an outpatient and Continuing Day Treatment Progam in an off-campus building at East 61st Street and York Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Payne Whitney Clinic is home to some of the most notable psychiatrists in the country, including Jack Barchas, Arnold Cooper, Robert Michels, Otto F. Kernberg, and Theodore Shapiro, and is the “voluntary faculty” home to such psychiatrists as Roy Shafer and Dan Stern. Dr. James F. Masterson practiced at the clinic for many years, heading the adolescent borderline unit and writing many books about the borderline personality.

The following high-profile individuals have died at this hospital:
Civil Rights icon Malcolm X (1965)
Puppeteer Jim Henson (1990)
Former United States President Richard Nixon (1994)
Musician Joey Ramone (2001)

For many years, heiress Sunny von Bülow was hospitalized there in a persistent vegetative state.

NewYork-Presbyterian Emergency Medical Services (NYP-EMS) is the largest hospital-based ambulance service in the City of New York.[citation needed] Since 1981, NYP-EMS has been one of the largest participants in the New York City 911 system. NYP-EMS also operates critical care transport ambulances throughout the New York City Metropolitan Area. The service is licensed to operate in the 5 counties of New York City, Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties in New York, and in the state of New Jersey for Basic Life Support and Specialty Care Transport. In addition to providing emergency and non-emergency ambulance services, either through the New York City 911 system on through the NYP-EMS Communications Center at Weill Cornell Medical Center, NYP-EMS provides stand-by EMS services for events throughout the New York City area, including the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and the NYC Triathlon.[citation needed]

NYP-EMS is also a New York State Department of Health-approved training center for EMT and Paramedic programs, several of which are approved for college-level credit by the New York State Department of Education. NYP-EMS operates one of the largest American Heart Association Emergency Cardiac Care training centers in New York.[citation needed]

NYP-EMS also maintains a Special Operations team trained in hazardous materials decontamination and technical rescue. This team, accompanied by several Weill Cornell Physicians, provided rescue and relief support on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most recently, the team decontaminated 28 patients after the 2007 New York City steam explosion in Midtown Manhattan on July 18th, 2007.[citation needed]

The hospital, along with Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, runs the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, a network of independent, cooperating, acute-care and community hospitals, continuum-of-care facilities, home-health agencies, ambulatory sites, and specialty institutes in the New York metropolitan area.[citation needed]

The New York Hospital was founded in 1771 by a Royal Charter granted by King George III of England and became associated with Weill Cornell Medical College upon the latter institution’s founding in 1898. It was the second oldest hospital in the United States. A 1927 endowment of more than $20 million by Payne Whitney expanded the hospital significantly and the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic is named in his honor. Other prominent donors include Howard Hughes, William Randolph Hearst, Harry and Leona Helmsley, Maurice R. Greenberg, and the Baker, Whitney, Lasdon, and Payson families.

The Presbyterian Hospital was founded in 1868 by James Lenox, a New York philanthropist and was associated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1925 the Sloane Hospital for Women, a leader in obstetrics and gynecology that had been founded in 1886, was incorporated.[3]

New York Hospital was the subject of a lawsuit from the family of Libby Zion, a young woman admitted in 1984 who died while under the care of hospital residents. An investigation by the New York state Health Commissioner, the Bell Commission, led to restrictions on the number of hours residents could work and required oversight of their care by accredited physicians. These reforms have since been adopted nationwide.[4]

As of 2007, the U.S. News and World Report rankings place NYPH overall as the sixth-best hospital in the United States. Every specialty was ranked by US News, and the following were ranked in the top 10: gynecology (5); heart and heart surgery (6); endocrinology (5); kidney disease (2); neurology and neurosurgery (3); urology (6); pediatrics (8); and psychiatry (4).[1][2]