Since it's founding in 1843, the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine has been at the forefront of medical research and education. Our medical school was one of the first in the country to employ instructors devoted to full-time teaching and research, and in 1888, it offered the first required laboratory course in physiology in the United States. Six of the first seven women to receive medical degrees from recognized allopathic medical schools graduated from Western Reserve University (as it was called then) between 1850 and 1856. In 1952, the School of Medicine initiated the most progressive medical curriculum in the country at that time, integrating the basic and clinical sciences. The multidisciplinary program presented integrated views of studying the body, gave students clinical experience in their first year of school, and cultivated students' sensitivity toward the whole patient, the patient's family, and the social context of illness.
Building on the School's tradition of innovation in education, CWRU entered into an agreement with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation to launch the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in 2004.
The CWRU School of Medicine is the largest biomedical research institution in Ohio, as measured by funding received from the National Institutes of Health, the nation's largest funding agency of biomedical research. The School receives more NIH funding than all other Ohio medical schools combined and is currently ranked #22 among all academic medical research centers nationally based on overall NIH funding. U.S. News and World Report also ranked the CWRU School of Medicine as a "Tier 1" medical school in 2024. The school has eleven Nobel Prize holders among its alumni and former and current faculty, as well as two graduates who have served as U.S. Surgeons General. Other alumni and former faculty have served important leadership roles at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Hastings Center for Bioethics Research. Go to http://casemed.case.edu for more information on the CWRU School of Medicine.
