Indiana University Medical Center

The Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) is a major, multi-campus medical school located throughout the U.S. state of Indiana and is both the undergraduate and graduate medical school of Indiana University. There are nine campuses throughout the state; the principal research, educational, and medical center is located on the campus of Indiana University Indianapolis. With 1,448 MD students, 191 PhD students, and 1,438 residents and fellows in the 2024–25 academic year, IUSM is the largest medical school in the United States. The school offers many joint degree programs including an MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program. It has partnerships with Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, other Indiana University system schools, and various in-state external institutions. It is the medical school with the largest number of graduates licensed in the United States per a 2018 Federation of State Medical Boards survey with 11,828 licensed physicians.

The school has pioneered research in multiple specialties, including oncology, immunology, substance use, neuroscience, and endocrinology. Research discoveries include a curative therapy for testicular cancer, the development of echocardiography, the identification of several genes linked to Alzheimer's disease, and the creation of inner ear sensory cells from pluripotent stem cells.

In the 2023 '' U.S. News & World Report'' rankings of the best graduate schools for medicine, the school ranked 23rd in the nation for primary care and 41st for research out of 192 medical schools. In the ''U.S. News & World Report'' rankings of the best hospitals, the Indiana University Health Medical Center had seventeen nationally ranked clinical programs. The Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health is nationally ranked in 9 of 10 designated specialties for children in the ''U.S. News & World Report.''https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/in/iu-health-academic-health-center-6420020 The IU School of Medicine is also home to the Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. In federal fiscal year 2023, IUSM ranked 29th for National Institutes of Health funding among all US medical schools (13th among all ''public'' US medical schools) with $243,608,100 of funding.

It was the only medical school in the state from when the Valparaiso University School of Medicine closed in 1917 to when the Tom and Julie Wood College of Osteopathic Medicine at Marian University opened in 2010. IUSM remains the state's only allopathic, MD degree-granting school.

The average MCAT score needed to be accepted into the IU School of Medicine in 2015 was 512, which is slightly higher than the national average, or roughly 506.5. The same year, the lowest score accepted was 497, while the highest score accepted by the school was 527.

History

Indiana University (IU) established a department of medicine at Bloomington in 1903, but the school in Indianapolis traces its founding to 1908, following the resolution of a rivalry with Purdue University over which institution had the legal authority to establish a medical school in Marion County.Burton D. Myers, "A History of Medical Education in Indiana" in A year after the IU- and Purdue-affiliated schools in Indianapolis were consolidated in 1908, the Indiana General Assembly authorized IU to operate a medical school in Marion County.Myers, pp. 79–80.

Founding in Bloomington

In March 1903, William Lowe Bryan, the tenth president of IU, proposed the formation of a department of medicine at IU Bloomington to the university trustees. The new department was approved and established in May of the same year. The IU School of Medicine was admitted as a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in 1904.

In addition to IUSM in Bloomington, IU's leaders wanted to locate medical training facilities in Indianapolis. Their initial plan was to provide medical students with the first two years of coursework at Bloomington and the final two years at Indianapolis, where students would receive clinically based training as part of their studies. Prior to 1908, due primarily to the high cost of establishing its own medical facilities in Indianapolis, IU attempted to merge with existing medical schools, but the effort was unsuccessful.

Earlier schools

The current school in Indianapolis is a chaotic mixture of many earlier medical colleges. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw many short-lived medical schools established in Indiana, mostly in Indianapolis, with the majority lasting less than a decade. This is mostly attributable to financial reasons and because most of medical education at this time was taught through an apprenticeship system and through private, for-profit schools. University-based schools with access to state funding and endowments became the standard model for medical education later on in the 1890s, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way.

The first Indiana school was established in 1833 as the Christian College at New Albany. It was largely regarded as a fraudulent diploma mill, and offered courses, but not degrees, in medicine. It closed the same year. The first public medical school, Vincennes University's department of medicine, was short lived as well, only lasting 1837–1838. Many other schools of varying quality and regard would open and close throughout the next 70 years.

The first successful school was the private LaPorte University School of Medicine (LPSM) founded in 1841. The first proprietary