The Graduate School of Medical Sciences was officially established in 1952 in New York City. Graduate studies in the biomedical sciences had been in existence at Cornell University Medical College for forty years prior to the graduate school's opening. In 1912, in cooperation with the Graduate School of Cornell University at Ithaca, the medical college offered its first graduate curriculum that led to advanced degrees in the biomedical sciences. In 1950, Cornell University, in association with the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, established a new division of the medical college for graduate study, the Sloan-Kettering Division. Two years later, in 1952, the Sloan-Kettering Division and other graduate activities of the medical college were brought together as the Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences. The first dean of the graduate school was appointed in 1969. In addition to the usual course of graduate studies, the Graduate School of Medical Sciences and the medical college have sponsored a coordinated M.D.-Ph.D. program since 1970. A second program of this kind was developed cooperatively in 1972, between the medical college and adjacent Rockefeller University. In 1998, the school was formally renamed as Joan and Sanford I. Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University. Later it was shortened to Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
The above history was revised and adapted from "History of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center", an article by Ralph Engle, Jr., M.D., that first appeared in the medical center's Directory of Alumni and Staff, 1980.
