Millions of times a year, patients travel from every county of Michigan and beyond to seek care at the hospitals and clinics of Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan’s academic medical center. 

Thousands of future and new doctors, nurses, biomedical scientists and other health professionals prepare for their careers in its classrooms, labs and clinical spaces. 

Countless discoveries about human health and disease spring from U-M research studies. 

All of this happens through the teamwork of thousands of U-M Medical School faculty and tens of thousands of research, clinical, education and administrative staff.

And it all started in 1850, in a single building on the eastern edge of the U-M Diag. 

As the map above shows, that one location grew into a health system that now spans most of the Lower Peninsula. Click on the pins in the map, or keep reading, to learn more about how that growth happened over the last 175 years. Learn more about U-M medical history here.

The early days of U-M medicine

In October of 1850, the first 90 medical students passed between the tall Greek columns of a freshly built three-story building. 

Their daily classes and anatomy demonstrations were taught by five physicians – all of them full members of the university faculty, a first for the United States. 

The first staff member, a bewhiskered German immigrant who had helped build the building, rang a handbell to signal the start and end of each class period. 

It was the state’s first medical school, and it was grounded in the latest science from its earliest days. Soon, a Chemical Laboratory sprang up beside the medical building, the first structure in the nation devoted to training students in chemistry. 

By the end of the Civil War, the number of aspiring physicians at U-M had grown to more than 500. The university and the citizens of Ann Arbor funded a tall addition to the Medical Building, which stood where today’s Physics Building is located.

Patients came from all over the state to have surgery or receive treatment at the hands of the doctors on the U-M faculty, while students peered down from the stacked rows of benches. 

To give these patients a better place to stay than local boarding houses, the university converted one of its four original homes for professors into a makeshift hospital, opening in December 1869 with 20 beds and a single steward. 

Located on North University Ave., where the Chemistry building now stands, it was the first university-owned hospital in the nation. 

By 1876, a long two-winged addition called the Pavilion rose behind it, greatly increasing the number of beds and types of care offered. 

Next door, a controversial Homeopathic Hospital opened at the command of the state legislature, along with a Homeopathic Medical School. They closed in 1922.

Meanwhile, the burgeoning sciences of microbiology, pharmacology and human anatomy and physiology fueled the construction of several new Medical School buildings on and near the Diag. State law changed in 1881 to allow the legal donation of bodies for anatomical education, bringing the procurement of “material” for students to study out of the shadows.

When U-M became the first major medical school in the country to admit women alongside men in 1870, those first “hen medics” were forced to learn separately for several years. Even after classes became truly co-educational, anatomy lessons were divided by gender until early in the 20^th century.

The Catherine Street hospitals

By the 1890s, the surging demand for patient care drove the construction of multiple hospital buildings on Catherine Street, on a bluff overlooking the Huron River.

The growing cluster of clinical care facilities included ones devoted to infectious diseases, pediatrics, psychiatric care, maternity care and conditions of the eyes and ears. Some of them were among the first of their kind in the country. 

This growth allowed medical students and recent medical graduates to take part in care directly, through some of the nation’s first clerkships, internships and specialized residencies. 

This novel idea was out of reach for other medical schools that lacked their own hospitals. The new hospitals also made U-M’s first nursing education program possible, and fostered collaborations with U-M’s dental and pharmacy schools. 

The 1925 University Hospital

The perennial story of medical care at Michigan – that new clinical facilities filled with surging patient demand as soon as they could be built – continued with the construction of the grand University Hospital at the corner of Ann and Observatory Streets. 

Designed by a team led by celebrity Detroit architect Albert Kahn, it opened in 1925, welcoming patients through an ornately carved stone arch. Soon after it opened, the first of many expansions got under way. 

As it grew, patients sought their destination in the byzantine structure using colored lines of tape on the floor. 

Next door to this hospital, which came to be known as Old Main, rose the Simpson Memorial Institute, devoted to clinical research on blood disorders. It still stands today, a testament to the power of donors to fuel discovery.

Mid-20^th Century growth

By the time of the Medical School’s centennial in 1950, leaders made plans to move its classroom education and laboratory research closer to the hospital complex. A cluster of new buildings made that possible, and the last labs moved over by 1970.

The surge in federally funded medical research after World War II spawned many new medications, medical imaging tools, clinical devices, surgical innovations, assistive technologies and more. These advances gradually made hospital stays shorter or unnecessary for many kinds of care and spurred a rapid rise in outpatient-based care.

New clinical buildings also cropped up in Old Main’s shadow starting in 1950, with the opening of a Women’s Hospital that brought maternal and newborn care into the modern era. 

Soon after, U-M’s first building built specifically for outpatient care opened. Now called the Med Inn, it also included the first emergency department and is still in use today. 

Down the road, U-M Medical School physicians helped spur the building of Ann Arbor’s VA hospital, and still help staff it and its research programs today.

Medical campus clinical growth and replacement

The rise of highly specialized pediatric care spurred the development of several major buildings. An inpatient psychiatric hospital for children and teens – one of the first of its kind in the country – opened in 1955 and served patients until 1992.  

A dedicated hospital for children’s medical care, the first to bear the name C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, opened in 1969 with 200 beds. It expanded to include a modern maternity unit in 1990. 

But by the early 21^st century it became clear that care for children from birth to late adolescence, and pregnancy and birth care, needed a new home. 

That led to the opening of a 1.1 million square foot facility in 2011, which bears not only the Mott name but also includes the Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital. It includes more than 340 inpatient beds and dedicated pediatric operating rooms, imaging suites and emergency department, as well as an entire tower devoted to outpatient care. 

As for adults, the campaign to build a hospital to replace Old Main began in the early 1970s, when a report labeled the massive 1925 hospital’s condition “marginal.” 

Finally, in December 1978, the Board of Regents approved a plan to build not only a new general adult hospital, but an adjoining outpatient facility on the bluff overlooking the Huron River. 

Dubbed the Replacement Hospital Project, the massive facility won funding from the State of Michigan as well as donors led by A. Alfred Taubman. The outpatient building was named in his honor. And on Valentine’s Day 1986, staff and students rolled patients in their beds from Old Main into the new University Hospital. 

Just over a decade later, the hospital got a new neighbor that housed both specialty outpatient care and laboratory research: the home of what is now the Rogel Cancer Center. The Geriatrics Center also started here, later moving to the east medical campus. 

Another specialized care facility arrived in 2007, when the Frankel Cardiovascular Center opened on part of the former site of Old Main. The former children’s hospital was converted for adult inpatient care as University Hospital South starting in 2015.

The main medical campus spilled across the Huron River to Wall Street starting in 1975, paving the way for today’s Kellogg Eye Center that opened in 1985 and doubled in size in 2010. Even the former St. Joseph Mercy hospital on North Ingalls Street became part of the U-M medical enterprise in 1977, converted into office and research space after St. Joe’s left for a new location outside the city.

Statewide clinical growth

While U-M physicians have traveled statewide for decades to see patients at visiting clinics, the last 45 years have seen Michigan Medicine grow its own locations beyond Ann Arbor’s city limits. It started in 1978 with a small Family Medicine practice in Chelsea. 

From there, U-M outpatient centers proliferated, including space within the sprawling Domino’s Farms complex and Briarwood Mall campus, and freestanding outposts in Wayne, Washtenaw and Livingston counties. 

An entire East Medical Campus in northeast Ann Arbor began to take shape in 1996 and expanded in the early 2000s. Today, it includes an outpatient surgery center, medical imaging, a pharmacy and multiple primary care and specialized clinics. It’s home to the Geriatrics Center and the Rachel Upjohn Building devoted to mental health care and research.

The geographic range and size of U-M’s satellite locations, and the complexity of care offered at them, continued to increase in the 2010s. That decade saw the opening of the Northville Health Center, Brighton Center for Specialty Care and West Ann Arbor Parkland Plaza. 

The past decade has also brought numerous new partnerships across the state. Two hospital systems in western and central Michigan have become part of U-M Health, taking on the new names UM Health-West and UM Health-Sparrow. Their multiple hospitals and clinics now proudly wear the block M across the Grand Rapids and Lansing areas.

Other partnerships include joint ventures with Trinity Health to run Chelsea Hospital and provide pediatric care, an affiliation with the multi-hospital MyMichigan Health system in north-central Michigan, and more. 

Modern research expansion

By the turn of the millennium, medical research space was tight, and older building designs didn’t work well for modern science. That spurred the construction of the A. Alfred Taubman Biomedical Sciences Research Building, which opened in 2005. 

It upended the traditional design for medical science spaces where small research teams worked in separate laboratory rooms or suites. Instead, the BSRB features open laboratory spaces that give more than 200 research teams flexible areas to work in, and shared tools. 

Just two years after the BSRB opened, the news that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was closing its 40-acre northeast Ann Arbor research campus hit the city like a meteor strike. 

But the university turned that disaster into an opportunity in 2009, when the site officially became U-M’s North Campus Research Complex. It was the university’s largest physical expansion in 60 years, with two million square feet of space across 28 buildings. 

Over the next decade, the formerly vacant site transformed into a vibrant hub, giving U-M faster access to research space that would have taken far more time and money to build from scratch. It has also spurred the launch of several new institutes and multiple startup companies. 

Though NCRC is largely devoted to research and scientific training, it also serves a key role in the university’s clinical mission too. It’s home to a new clinical pathology facility where teams analyze samples of blood, tissue and more to diagnose and guide the treatment of patients at U-M Health’s hospitals and clinics, and at other health systems too.

The new Pavilion hospital and beyond

The newest addition to the medical campus, opening in late 2025, rises 10 stories above street level, with two more below ground. Called the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Health Care Pavilion, its gleaming glass face hints at the high-tech surgical and inpatient care environment within. But its location and name hearken back to U-M’s medical past.  

It rises above a street named for one of the Medical School’s founders, Zina Pitcher, M.D., and stands on a site that once included part of the 1925 University Hospital and the 1950s-era Kresge research complex. The term “pavilion” echoes the name given to the extension of U-M’s first hospital when it opened in 1876. 

By 2027, U-M’s list of specialized satellites will include a new facility in Troy, the first U-M multi-specialty site in Oakland County. 

And then there’s the ultimate expansion: into patients’ homes. 

While a visiting nurse service and other home-based care have been part of U-M’s medical services for decades, the 2020s brought an explosion of possibilities.  

Telehealth visits and secure digital messages between patients and clinicians, and among care teams, have become critical parts of U-M care. Today, 1 in 6 outpatient encounters between U-M providers and patients takes place via video. Some patients even receive hospital-level care at home through a combination of technology and home visits. 

The first medical students and faculty physicians in 1850 couldn’t have imagined this future. But they, and those who came after them, laid the groundwork for it to happen.