Geisel School of Medicine: The Doctor Who Wasn't

The medical school bearing the Geisel name on the Dartmouth campus has a founding story rooted in frontier necessity, and a naming story rooted in a literary joke.

Dartmouth Medical School was established in seventeen ninety-seven by Dr. Nathan Smith, a self-taught Vermont physician who recognized that the rural Connecticut River Valley was desperately short of trained doctors. He essentially built the curriculum himself, teaching anatomy, surgery, chemistry, and midwifery. The school became the fourth-oldest medical school in the United States, serving a region where physicians might travel twenty miles by horseback to reach a patient.

Over two centuries, the school accumulated a remarkable series of firsts. In eighteen thirty-eight, faculty here introduced the stethoscope to American medical practice. In eighteen ninety-six, just weeks after Wilhelm Roentgen announced the discovery of x-rays in Germany, Dartmouth produced the first clinical x-ray taken in the United States. In the twentieth century, the school created one of the first multispecialty intensive care units in the country and produced the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, a landmark study revealing enormous geographic variations in how American medicine is practiced, which helped launch the modern health care reform debate.

The name Geisel came in twenty twelve, when the school was renamed to honor Audrey and Theodor Geisel. Theodor Geisel was a Dartmouth graduate of the class of nineteen twenty-five, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss. He never earned a doctorate, and the title on his pen name began as a nod to his father's hope that he would become a doctor. Now the joke has become official. The medical school buildings here carry the name of the man who wrote The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, and the institution takes a certain delight in pointing out that its namesake's only doctorate was honorary.