The library here has brokered some deals for free PDA software. One of them is with Thomson-MicroMedex. I went to register at their software site (sorry, customer ID is required) and learned about a set of medical schools I’d never heard of before.
As part of the registration process, I indicated I was a medical student in New York state, and they asked me which school. I thought I knew of every school in New York, but I found some surprises in their drop-down list:
- Bellevue Hosp Med Coll, New York, NY
- Eclectic Med Coll of The City of New York, NY
- Fordham Univ Sch of Med, New York, NY
- New York Med Coll and Hosp for Women
- NYU Med Coll
I checked and found that the unknown (to me) schools above are historical.
It turns out that the NYU and Bellevue names are related. According to the NYU SOM entry in Wikipedia, NYU started a Medical College in 1841. In 1859, Bellevue Hospital Medical College started. In 1898, the schools and Bellevue Hospital merged. In 1960 the medical school was renamed to NYU School of Medicine. (“Bellevue Hospital Medical College” and “Bellevue Medical College” may have been separate entities, I’m not sure.)
All I can find on the Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York is that it was organized in 1865 and “extinct” in 1913. (That page is typed from Polk’s Medical Register and Directory of North America, 1914-1915.)
As for Fordham, the same link above indicates Fordham started a medical school in 1905, but it’s definitely not there now.
New York Medical College and Hospital for Women was chartered in 1866. After it closed in 1918, students transferred to the New York Homeopathic Medical College, which at some point dropped “Homeopathic” and became NYMC.
I find this all pretty fascinating, and wonder why Micromedex didn’t include a wider selection of ancient New York medical schools on their list. Perhaps the Eclectic is one of the few extinct colleges that has started to use Micromedex PDA software.
Tags: history · medical school · New York2 Comments
Hi – I’m considering getting a pda soon. I was googling Palm z22 & Micromedex and I came across your site. It was very useful for me to know all the programs you were able to download (particularly epocrates). By chance, were you able to download or do you know if micromedex or lexi-comp can be downloaded? If you could email me back at jongeun@u.washington.edu – it would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
Hi, Julie. According to the UW PDA Resource Guide, UW students can get mobileMicromedex through this UW Library link which will require your university ID and password.