Rutgers Medical College (New York, N.Y.)

The history of Queen's and Rutgers College's involvement in medical education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries centers on Nicholas Romayne, and David Hosack, two prominent New York City physicians who sought at various times an academic sponsorship for their medical schools. Their flamboyant personalities and notoriety attracted students and money away from competing schools and drew animosity to them like a magnet. The story of the intrigues and political in-fighting of New York City's physicians, their medical societies and institutions during this time period is a complex one. (1) Queen's/Rutgers College was the beneficiary of its geographic proximity to New York City, but in each case, sponsorship by the New Brunswick school created controversy in the medical profession in New York and resulted in political maneuvering involving county and state medical societies, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Regents of the State University of New York, the New York State Legislature, and ultimately, the New York State Supreme Court.

In 1767, King's College established a medical faculty but the school had not prospered. In the post-Revolutionary years the school reorganized into Columbia College and reconstituted its medical faculty in 1785. Nicholas Romayne, a physician educated in Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Leyden, and who had gained some prominence in New York City, assumed the post of Professor of the Practice of Physic, and two years later became a Columbia trustee. Though no longer allowed to serve on the faculty, Romayne continued to lecture and in 1791 petitioned the Regents of the State University of New York to charter his own medical school, the first of several attempts which resulted in controversy. The potential establishment of a competing institution spurred the Columbia trustees into action and they succeeded in persuading the Regents to reject Romayne's request. Determined to align with a collegiate institution, Romayne turned to the trustees of Queen's College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to establish a medical faculty. Though the trustees never appointed a faculty, they did agree to confer M.D. degrees in 1792 on Nicholas Romayne himself, and on others who Romayne had recommended. In 1793 six more degrees were conferred, the last to be presented in the eighteenth century. Romayne departed to Europe, came back home only to be imprisoned in the Blount Affair, and sailed off to Europe again. (2)

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