The History of Stanford Medicine

Visitors to Stanford Hospital often assume the medical school grew up on the campus around it. It did not. For its first five decades Stanford's medical school lived in San Francisco, in buildings it inherited from an older college. The move south to a new medical center beside Palo Alto in 1959 reshaped the school and tied it to the city next door in a way few people remember.

This page follows that story from the 1850s to the hospital that opened in 2019. For practical help with a visit, see our guides to visiting Stanford Hospital and the School of Medicine. The timeline below draws mainly on the School of Medicine's academic affairs handbook, Lane Library and Stanford Medicine's own list of firsts.

Roots in San Francisco

The school's ancestry goes back to Dr. Elias Samuel Cooper, who started a medical department of the University of the Pacific in San Francisco. Stanford's academic affairs handbook dates the founding to 1858, although its opening paragraph says 1853, so sources disagree. The department closed in 1864 when its faculty, including Cooper's nephew Levi Cooper Lane, moved to Toland Medical College. Lane and his colleagues left Toland in 1870 and revived the department. In 1872 it was renamed the Medical College of the Pacific.

Lane was the school's great patron. In 1882 he gave it a new building at Sacramento and Webster Streets and the school became Cooper Medical College. He paid for more lecture halls and labs in 1890. Then he funded Lane Hospital at Clay and Webster Streets, which opened in 1895 along with a training school for nurses. Lane Library, which traces its own history to 1882, calls Cooper "the first medical school in the Western United States."

The library got its name in 1906, when Pauline Lane gave a third of her estate to Cooper Medical College in memory of her husband. By the time Stanford took over, Lane says, it was the largest medical library west of Chicago.

Stanford takes over in 1908

In 1908 Cooper Medical College transferred its San Francisco buildings and equipment to Stanford, which made it the Medical Department of Stanford University. The handbook describes a split arrangement that lasted half a century. Clinical training and some basic sciences stayed in San Francisco, while other basic science courses were taught on the Palo Alto campus. The last Cooper class graduated in 1912.

In 1917 Stanford opened its own hospital on Clay Street next to Lane Hospital. Together they were known as Stanford Lane Hospital. For four decades, Stanford medical students learned their trade in the city, more than 30 miles from the Main Quad. The school's first dean was Ray Lyman Wilbur, who later served as Stanford's president.

The move south, 1953 to 1959

In 1953 the Board of Trustees decided to bring the medical school to the main campus. The handbook does not give the reasons. Histories of the period usually connect the move to President Wallace Sterling's push to build Stanford into a research university, with medicine working alongside the sciences and engineering a short walk away. Our history of Stanford covers the Sterling and Terman era.

The new buildings went up at the north edge of campus near Sand Hill Road. Edward Durell Stone designed them. His patterned concrete screens still mark the older parts of the complex. Our Stanford architecture guide places Stone's work beside the sandstone of the Main Quad.

In 1959 the school, its clinics and the new hospital opened together as Stanford University Medical Center. Lane Library moved down from San Francisco at the same time.

A hospital shared with Palo Alto

The detail most locals have forgotten is that Palo Alto was a co-owner. According to the handbook, the hospital was financed jointly by the university and the City of Palo Alto. It was known as the Palo Alto-Stanford Hospital Center. The city gained a modern hospital and the school gained a teaching hospital on its doorstep. In 1968 Stanford bought the city's interest and renamed it Stanford University Hospital. The city's own postwar boom is told on our page about Palo Alto's postwar growth.

Medical firsts

Stanford Medicine keeps a long list of research and clinical firsts. A few stand out from the decades around the move:

• 1956: first use in the Western Hemisphere of a linear accelerator to treat cancer. Stanford Health Care credits the machine to Henry Kaplan and Edward Ginzton.
• 1959: Arthur Kornberg wins the Nobel Prize for work on how cells make DNA.
• 1960: the first kidney transplant in California.
• 1964: electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve in deaf patients, an early step toward cochlear implants.
• 1968: Norman Shumway's team performs the first adult human heart transplant in the United States.
• 1972: Paul Berg builds the first recombinant DNA molecule containing DNA from two species.
• 1981: Bruce Reitz's team completes the first successful combined heart and lung transplant.

The school's research tradition runs straight into its Nobel Prizes, from Kornberg to Karl Deisseroth in 2026. Our page on Stanford's Nobel laureates lists them all.

Mergers and new names

The business side of Stanford medicine went through several rounds of reorganizing. In 1994 the faculty practice merged with Stanford University Hospital to form Stanford Health Services. Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, which opened in 1991, joined in 1997. That same year Stanford Health Services merged with UCSF's medical center and faculty practice to form UCSF Stanford Health Care, which the handbook calls the first merger of its kind between private and state medical centers.

The experiment did not last. In 1999 it split back into Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Today the adult hospital is run by Stanford Health Care and the children's hospital by Stanford Children's Health. Stanford Medicine is the umbrella name for the school and both health systems.

Growth beyond the 1959 buildings

From the 1990s the medical campus kept growing. The Center for Clinical Sciences Research opened in 2000 and the Stanford Cancer Center in 2004. In 2009 the Stanford Medicine Outpatient Center opened in Redwood City, years before the university's larger Stanford Redwood City campus. The Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, the school's main teaching building, opened to students in May 2010.

Stanford Health Care also lists the Hoover Pavilion as opening in 2013. The building stands on Quarry Road near Stanford Shopping Center. Local histories date it to the early 1930s, when it opened as Palo Alto's hospital, decades before the 1959 medical center.

The new hospital, 2019

The biggest recent change is impossible to miss from Sand Hill Road. The new Stanford Hospital at 500 Pasteur Drive was dedicated on October 23, 2019 and admitted its first patients on November 17, 2019. According to Stanford Medicine it is a seven-story building of 824,000 square feet with 368 private patient rooms, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects and surrounded by about four acres of gardens. It was built to meet modern seismic standards and to replace inpatient space in the older buildings.

Stone's 1959 building at 300 Pasteur Drive remains in use beside it. Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, a short walk away on Welch Road, doubled in size in December 2017.

Seeing the history today

• Stone's screens: walk the older buildings along Pasteur Drive to see the concrete patterns from 1959.
• The new hospital gardens: the landscaped grounds around 500 Pasteur Drive are part of the 2019 project.
• Lane Library: it houses the Stanford Medical History Center, but the library is closed to the public and card access only since April 27, 2026.
• San Francisco: nothing of Cooper Medical College or Lane Hospital survives as a visitor site. The old campus stood around Sacramento, Clay and Webster Streets in Pacific Heights. See our San Francisco day trip guide for the city.

The medical campus is busy with patients and families. If you are visiting someone in hospital, our hospital visitor guide covers parking, shuttles and visiting hours.

Frequently asked questions