Case Western Reserve School of Medicine (CWRU SOM, CaseMed) is the medical school of Case Western Reserve University, a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. It is the largest biomedical research center in Ohio. CWRU SOM is primarily affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic, ranked the world’s second-best hospital in 2023. It is also affiliated with University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.
On November 1, 1843, under President George Edmond Pierce, five faculty members including Jared Potter Kirtland and John Delamater, and sixty-seven students began the first medical lectures at the Medical Department of Western Reserve College (also known as the Cleveland Medical College) in Hudson, Ohio. Kirtland and Delamater had previously been instructors at a medical college started in 1834, the Medical Department of Willoughby University of Lake Erie, which had closed in 1843 due to faculty disagreements. Other faculty from that Medical Department went on to found Willoughby Medical College of Columbus, a precursor to the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
In 1852, the medical school became the second in the U.S. to graduate a woman, Nancy Talbot Clark. 1854 MD alumna, Emily Blackwell became the third woman in the US to receive a regular medical degree. Six of the first seven women in the United States to receive medical degrees from recognized allopathic medical schools graduated from Western Reserve University between 1850 and 1856, which included Marie Zakrzewska.
In 1909, Abraham Flexner surveyed and evaluated each of the 155 medical schools then extant in North America, with his results published the following year in what came to be known as the Flexner Report. The results proved shocking: most "medical schools," for example, had entrance requirements no more stringent than either high school diploma or "rudiments or the recollection of a common school education." Only sixteen schools required at least two years of college as an entrance requirement, and of these, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Western Reserve were the only schools to require an undergraduate degree.