April 29, 2004

McGaw Pavilion renovation adds to medical education facilities

$35M project converts former Dental School space, providing Feinberg School of Medicine more than 160,000 square feet for clinical education, labs, auditorium

The Feinberg School of Medicine now occupies the renovated McGaw Pavilion of the Health Sciences Building, which formerly housed the Dental School. The facility provides more than 160,000 net square feet of space in the building which is bounded by Superior and Huron streets and Fairbanks Court.

photo by Stephen Anzaldi

The Feinberg School of Medicine now occupies the renovated McGaw Pavilion of the Health Sciences Building, which formerly housed the Dental School.

The $35 million-plus project financed by the Feinberg School has greatly increased the school’s facilities for student education and other operations, providing more than 160,000 net square feet of space.

The renovation of the former Dental School space in the Health Sciences Building, bounded by Superior and Huron streets and Fairbanks Court, began last fall.

“The first and most important use is for medical student education,” said Executive Associate Dean for Education Raymond H. Curry, M.D. “This represents our first new education space since the group study rooms and Learning Resources Center were added during the Galter Library renovation in 1996.”

The Feinberg School has shared lecture halls and other classrooms with the other Chicago campus schools for decades.

The Clinical Education Center (formerly the Clinical Education and Evaluation Center) has moved from Abbott Hall rooms to the first floor of the pavilion. The facility is designed to promote development and mastery of clinical skills in students, residents, attending physicians and others.

The center has 12 examination rooms, each equipped with audio and digital video technology that records patient-student interactions for later review. The audio-video feedback area includes 14 computer stations that students can use to review their examination. The computers also provide access to additional resources useful in student training.

The center also has a case study room, a tiered, horseshoe-shaped area that accommodates seating for 45 people, a configuration that facilitates interaction between students and faculty.

The facility also provides space for seminars and classes in the Continuing Medical Education and Graduate Medical Education programs.

Department of anesthesiology offices occupy space on the first floor of the building.

The Feinberg School’s department of medicine has occupied 32,000 net square feet of research space on the second floor. The space accommodates 25 to 30 researchers and their staffs and is designed to promote collaboration among researchers.

The second-floor facilities include a laboratory bay, with open suites of benches and special procedure alcoves, and a core facilities area that provides access to the labs and connects them with common support functions.

The second floor will be home to department of medicine divisions whose work relates to various aspects of immunology, including allergy-immunology, rheumatology, pulmonary and critical care medicine, and immunotherapy for autoimmune diseases.

The third floor features a 182-seat auditorium named in honor of Daniel Hale Williams, M.D., the first African-American alumnus of the medical school (1883), a noted surgeon and an important figure in the development of American medicine. Additional case study and seminar rooms adjoin the auditorium.

Second-year medical students will call the Williams auditorium “home” for lectures and presentations. First-year students will use the new Hughes Auditorium in The Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center when it opens in 2005.

“When the education space in the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center is completed, we will have consolidated all our main education facilities at the center of the medical campus,” said Curry.

The Health Sciences Building was opened in 1979 as a joint venture between Northwestern University and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. It originally housed the University’s Dental School and the hospital’s intensive care unit, cancer research center and emergency, radiology and surgery departments.

Plans for renovation of the three floors of the McGaw Pavilion began after the closing of the Dental School in 2001.

In addition to the McGaw Pavilion on Huron Street, the Health Sciences Building includes the Olson Pavilion on Fairbanks Court which houses Northwestern Memorial Hospital facilities and The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

The McGaw Pavilion is named for University benefactors Foster McGaw and Mary McGaw, for whom the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University is also named.

Auditorium named for Williams

Daniel Hale Williams, a surgeon, was the first black student to earn his medical degree from Northwestern University.

He received his M.D. degree from Northwestern Chicago Medical College in 1883, 13 years after Northwestern and the college became affiliated.

He completed an internship at Mercy Hospital, which was co-founded by John Evans, principal founder of Northwestern, and was affiliated with the University.

Williams, who served on the Northwestern medical faculty (1885-89), was a surgeon who performed the world’s first successful heart operation in 1893.

Williams founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first interracial hospital, after a young black woman asked his help in getting admitted to an all-white nursing school in Chicago. He decided that the black community should establish its own interracial hospital and nursing school.

As surgeon-in-chief of Freedman’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., 1893-98, Williams established a second training school for black nurses and established internships for black doctors.

Williams was a charter member of the American College of Surgeons, founded in 1913. He was a member of the American Medical Association (founded in 1883 by one of Williams’ professors, Dean Nathan Smith Davis of Northwestern University Medical School), and a charter member of the interracial National Medical Association.