A new medical school is coming to Charlotte, but what happened to the first one?
A new era for education in Charlotte will start next summer when Wake Forest University opens the first four-year medical school for the Queen City.
And it’s long overdue, especially since Charlotte is one of the largest U.S. cities without one. But an attempt to fill the void was made more than a century ago with the long-forgotten North Carolina Medical College in uptown.
More than 700 students attended the college in Charlotte, and 40 doctoral degrees were awarded by the faculty, according to historians. Many went on to build medical practices throughout North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission reported.
Located at 229 N. Church St., the building is designated as a historical landmark by Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. The architect work of James McMichael was another reason for the designation. He designed the building and popular churches in the area.
The basement contained showers, toilets, cadaver vats and service rooms, according to the historic commission. An entrance on Sixth Street provided access to a dispensary which had a drug room, separate waiting rooms for Black and white patients and several examination/treatments rooms.
Free medical services were offered for an hour between 11 a.m. and noon during the week.
The school’s first and second floors had a lounge, administrative offices, demonstration/lecture spaces, lecture hall, library and a reading room. Students also had access to two labs and a dissecting hall on the uppermost floor.
A two-story amphitheater was at the rear of the building to hold at least 250 people, according to Mecklenburg County historical records.
Wrong place at the wrong time?
Before the school opened, North Carolina didn’t have a medical school after several places in the mid- and late-1800s opened and closed, according to historians.
In 1887, Dr. Paul Barringer, a physician at Davidson College, established the Davidson School of Medicine in Mecklenburg County. About two years later, Barringer went to the University of Virginia and sold the medical school to Dr. John Munroe.
Munroe expanded the school and it became a three-year institution. He made a way to get a larger building for the college in 1896 and a structure for clinical teaching in 1901.
A year later, the college sent its senior students to classes in Charlotte for clinical training since there were a lot of hospitals in the city. And in 1907, the entire student body moved to the building on North Church Street.
The college left Davidson to take advantage of more opportunities in Charlotte. More than 80 students enrolled in 1907.
North Carolina Medical School was thriving for a while. But that changed in 1910 when the Carnegie Foundation, a policy and research center, sent a representative to evaluate the school — and the results were not positive. The school was criticized for not having adequate facilities.
Criticis called it “thoroughly wretched,” said Tommy Warlick, historic preservation specialist for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission.
“They really dumped on the laboratories and the instruction,” he said. “They said there weren’t adequate books. They really shot the facility full of holes.”
Monroe and his associates didn’t have enough funding or were unwilling to spend money on improvements to please the Carnegie Foundation, according to historians.
The school closed in 1914 and students then enrolled at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond to finish their studies. They received their degrees as graduates of the North Carolina Medical School. The last degrees were awarded in 1917, according to the historic landmarks commission.
It had a short life due to being in “the crossfire” of standards changing in the medical field, said Franky Abbott, chief content strategist for The Levine Museum of the New South. The days of learning medicine by becoming a doctor’s apprentice were disappearing around that time.
“They were caught in this sort of wrong moment of this big education revolution in medical schools in the U.S.,” she added, “forced to close maybe before their time.”
The building was sold and converted into apartments. It’s now being used for condos with monthly rent listings close to $2,000. Goodwill Industries and the local convention bureau used the space for offices before the condos came.
“As the city grows so quickly, it’s really easy to forget to not know the way back stories, and the North Carolina Medical College, I think, has been often forgotten,” said community historian Tom Hanchett.
Remembering the past, embracing the future
The Wake Forest University School of Medicine-Charlotte creates a second campus in midtown for the Winston-Salem-based school, with officials anticipating accepting 48 students for the class of 2029.
Its new campus will be on 20-acres at the corner of South McDowell and Baxter streets, as part of the Pearl District. The $1.5 billion project will include retail, offices, hotels, apartments and academic spaces after construction is complete. Atrium Health and Wexford Science & Technology have partnered to build the district.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held in January 2023.
Local historians wonder what could have been if the old medical school was allowed to continue.
Although the school granted medical degrees, it’s unclear if North Carolina Medical College was a four-year program — or they probably didn’t exist at that time, according to local historians. But Warlick stressed that it’s important to remember history and the contributions from it.
“It’s always important for us to get the story straight and to make sure that our history is accurate,” Warlick said. “We’ve got the full understanding of it.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A new medical school is coming to Charlotte, but what happened to the first one?."
