The History of the Medical College of Georgia

Phinizy Spalding traces the development of Georgia’s oldest medical school from the initial plans of a small group of physicians to the five school complex found in Augusta in the late 1980s. Charting a course filled with great achievement and near-fatal adversity, Spalding shows how the life of the college has been intimately bound to the local community, state politics, and the national medical establishment.

When the Medical Academy of Georgia opened its doors in 1828 to a class of seven students, the total number of degreed physicians in the state was fewer than one hundred. Spalding traces the history of the Academy through its early robust growth in the antebellum years; its slowed progress during the Civil War; its decline and hardships during the early half of the twentieth century; and finally its resurgence and a new era of optimism starting in the 1950s.

“Spalding writes with a delightful, sprightly, elegant style, especially in the early chapters...[and he] succeeds in his ambitious construction of a historical mosaic. ...Spalding and the Medical College of Georgia are to be congratulated for introducing Georgia’s medical professionals to a more sophisticated model of their medical heritage.”

—Journal of Southern History

“Spalding has ably served the alumni for whom the volume is largely intended and has provided historians with a well-researched account of how patterns that are generally familiar were expressed in one institution.”—American Historical Review

Phinizy Spalding (1930–1994) was a professor of history at the University of Georgia. He was the author of numerous books including Oglethorpe in America and a coauthor of A History of Georgia (both Georgia).