VCU and the Egyptian Building: Medicine Meets the Pharaohs
Near Richmond, Virginia
Virginia Commonwealth University runs along the northwestern edge of downtown Richmond, and on its oldest block stands one of the strangest and most beautiful academic buildings in the American South: the Egyptian Building, completed in eighteen forty-five and still in daily use for medical instruction almost a hundred and eighty years later.
The institution that would become VCU began in eighteen thirty-eight as the Medical Department of Hampden-Sydney College. Richmond's civic leaders wanted a medical school, and they started in the Union Hotel on Main Street, cramming lecture halls and a small infirmary into the building's old ballrooms. Within a few years they needed something permanent.
Architect Thomas Sommerville Stewart was hired to design their first real building, and he made an unexpected choice. He rendered the facade in the Egyptian Revival style, with massive battered columns like the temples at Luxor, a cavetto cornice at the roofline, a ceremonial entrance flanked by cast-iron lotus-column gates, and a lotus-capital portico that looks more like the Nile Valley than the James River. The reasoning was deliberate: Egyptian civilization was understood in the eighteen forties as the cradle of Western medicine, its priest-physician Imhotep the ancestor of Hippocrates. A medical school, the architects decided, should look like the place where medicine was born.
The Medical College of Virginia became independent in eighteen fifty-four and a state institution in eighteen sixty. In nineteen sixty-eight the Virginia General Assembly merged it with the Richmond Professional Institute to create Virginia Commonwealth University. The Egyptian Building became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-one.
It is now considered one of the finest surviving examples of Egyptian Revival architecture in the United States. Students walk past those lotus-column gates every morning on their way to anatomy class, the same way students have been doing for nearly two centuries.
