The youngest of the nation’s leading medical schools, Duke is one of the world's premier centers for medical education, clinical care and biomedical research.

Planning for the school began in 1925, when businessman James Buchanan Duke, benefactor of Duke University and The Duke Endowment, bequeathed $4 million to establish the Duke School of Medicine, the Duke School of Nursing and Duke Hospital.

Less than five years after the school opened in 1930, the Association of American Medical Colleges ranked Duke in the top quarter of medical schools in the country.

Now, more than 75 years later, the Duke University School of Medicine is firmly in the top 10 medical schools nationally. The medical campus encompasses 90 buildings on 210 acres and employs over 1,500 faculty physicians and researchers.

Duke programmatic accomplishments include:

• The world’s first brain tumor program, established in 1937.
• An outstanding clinical research organization (now called the Duke Clinical Research Institute), dating back to the 1960s.
  
• The nation’s first Physician Assistant Program started at Duke in 1965.
• A unique curriculum for MD students, with an entire year dedicated to research or work towards a second degree.
  
• One of the oldest Medical Scientist Training Programs (MD/PhD) in the country.
• One of the first and most prominent Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) sites.
  
• Partnership with the National University of Singapore to create Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore based on Duke’s unique curriculum that reserves the third year for scholarly research. The school admitted its first class in fall 2007.
• Collaboration with other schools of the university in three Duke-wide institutes:  the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, the Duke Global Health Institute, and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
  

Learn more about the history and heritage of the School of Medicine at this Duke University Medical Center Archives retrospective.