Gown Joins Town

A medical frost that had long lain upon New Haven, Conn, was thawed out last week. The Yale School of Medicine, opened in 1813, and the Grace-New Haven Community Hospital, dating from 1826, decided to get together in a formal medical center. Also joining the combine will be Yale's School of Nursing, its Psychiatric Institute, Department of Public Health and its famed Child Study Center (TIME, Jan. 7, 1952).

Though school and hospital cooperated in some degree down the years, they muffed the chance to get into the forefront of medical progress by joining forces when other medical centers began to be set up (e.g., Manhattan's pace-making Columbia-Presbyterian). Yale Graduate Harvey Gushing, later one of the world's most famed neurosurgeons, refused an appointment from his alma mater in 1906 because he thought the school was in the doldrums and would not get out until it teamed up with the hospital.

Besides the obvious advantages expected from the merger (better care of patients, better facilities for training doctors and nurses), there were three which New Haven's medical top brass was too discreet to mention: 1) the center should attract wealthy patients who now go to Boston or Manhattan for major operations or treatments, 2) it will be able to treat patients with rare ailments, which medical students otherwise would never see, and 3) it should break down some of the town-v.-gown feeling which has resulted in Yale doctors' sending their patients to one unit of the hospital, while town doctors huddled in another.

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