Physicians and Surgeons of the Southern District of New York in the City of New York. In its first year it had seven professors, forty students, and a hundred and one trustees. It had no connection with any other teaching educational institution. It was the first "independent medical school” in America.
In 1802 in Fairfield, Herkimer County, New York, a village of two hundred people about sixty miles west of Albany, was established (incorporated in 1803) an academy of the type common in New England. To it in 1808 came as a teacher of chemistry Dr. Josiah Noyes, a graduate in both arts and medicine at Dartmouth. As early as 1809 Dr. Noyes and a practitioner of a neighboring town gave courses in anatomy and materia medica and physiology.
In 1812 the Medical Society of the Western District of New York, which comprised more than two-thirds of the total area of the state, sought a charter to establish a medical school at Fairfield on the same basis as that established in New York City five years earlier, namely, with an initial grant from the state treasury of $10,000 followed by annual appropriations of $1,000 and with the degrees to be granted by the University of the State of New York.
Such a charter was granted and the institution was named the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York at Fairfield. Because of the cumbersome name and the similarity to the name of the institution in New York City this institution throughout its twenty-eight years of existence was familiarly called the Fairfield Medical School, instead of by its legal name, and this familiar designation will be used hereafter in referring to this school.
Up to the date of 1812 all of the eight preceding medical schools had been located in relatively large cities with the single exception of that one in connection with Dartmouth College. The origin of the Fairfield school therefore, made the second of the type which came to be known as “country medical schools.” Both on account of the influence of Dr. Noyes, a Dartmouth graduate, and the similarity of location in a country village, Dartmouth became the definite pattern of Fairfield in its organization. Instruction began in October, 1812, under
