The Founding (1858-1870)

It has already been noted that the first medical school in the Far West was founded in San Francisco in 1858 by Dr. Elias Samuel Cooper (1820-1862) as the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific; and that this original medical college was the forerunner of Stanford Medical School.

The University of the Pacific was established in 1851 by the Methodist Church and was the first college to be chartered by the State of California. It was located at that time in the town of Santa Clara, some 48 miles south of San Francisco. In 1871, the school moved to San Jose, and from there to Stockton in 1921. The University of the Pacific had authority from the State to grant degrees, including the MD For this reason Cooper and his colleagues petitioned the Trustees of the University to create a Medical Department with them as the faculty, and their request was granted. ^[9]

The school and Cooper were both subjected from the outset to virulent criticism from a strong faction of San Francisco physicians. The school would certainly have had a brief and hapless life but for Cooper's vigorous advocacy, and his perceptive choice of five resolute and loyal men who joined him in the enterprise, and with him constituted the original faculty. Providentially, there was soon the addition to the faculty of a new member who was ultimately by his own efforts and personal resources to ensure the survival of the school. This was Cooper's nephew, Dr. Levi Cooper Lane (1828-1902), appointed Professor of Physiology in 1861.

Having just begun to gain acceptance in the region and to award some 5 MD degrees each year, the school entered the most precarious period of its entire existence. Elias Cooper died in 1862, finally succumbing at the age of 41 to the obscure neurological disorder first manifest at the time of his departure from Peoria, Illinois for California. Without his leadership, the school's momentum slackened.

During the first few years of the new School, Cooper's most prestigious surgical rival, Dr. Hugh Huger Toland (1806-1880) perfected his own plan to found a medical school, and constructed a new building for the purpose on Stockton Street near Chestnut in downtown San Francisco. He announced in 1864 that the Toland Medical School would open in the fall. Outclassed and outflanked, the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific suspended operation while Dr. Lane and several key faculty colleagues from the Medical Department accepted the invitation of Dr. Toland to join the faculty of his new school. However, they later regretted their decision and in 1870 withdrew from the Toland School. They then reactivated the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific which had been suspended from 1865 through 1869.

In 1873 the Toland School became the Medical Department of the University of California (now the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco). And so we see that the sometime competitive relationship between UCSF, Stanford Medical School and their antecedents dates from 1864.

The revival of the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific in 1870 marks the close of the school's hectic, fledgling period, wherein a self-taught and contentious surgeon from Peoria, Elias Samuel Cooper, was the indomitable moving spirit. In a sense, Cooper can be said to be responsible for the founding of not one, but two medical schools in San Francisco. There can be no doubt that the impetus for the Toland School was Dr. Toland's rivalry with Cooper and the craving to trump his hand.