1889

Frederick Novy begins teaching full-semester lecture-laboratory course in bacteriology for first-year med students at University of Michigan – the first such lecture-lab course in America. Daily one-hour lectures were followed by four-hour lab sessions five days a week for all first-year med students. Novy took the same equipment and methods that he used in his research and made them essential to medical instruction, introducing students to microscopes, solid culture plates, agar preparation, pipettes, incubators, sterilizers, and the handling of animals. Students were taught to identify microbes and then determine whether or not they caused disease according to Koch’s postulates. He wanted med students to learn how to prove or disprove experimentally what they were taught in books and in lectures. To accommodate Novy’s course, Victor Vaughan, his chief, recommended lengthening med school at Michigan from three to four years, which was approved by the Board of Regents in 1891. Two decades later, the Flexner Report attested to the value of laboratory work in med education, crediting Michigan “as a medical school that had already been succeeding in this initiative and as a ‘model of medical education’ in America” (P. Kazanjian, ch 3, quote at loc 1991).