History of Medicine

     HOW STANFORD CAME AND WENT 

               FROM SAN FRANCISCO

                             

     On the southeast corner of Pacific Avenue and Divisidero Street in San Francisco stands a large beautifully preserved wooden Victorian mansion, replete with turrets, its own water supply on the top floor, and large windows looking out on perhaps the most expensive real estate in the city. Few who drive by as they cross

Ellinwood House (photograph by author)

Pacific Heights know that it belonged to perhaps the most hated doctor who ever lived in the City. His name was Charles N. Ellinwood (1838-1917). The story is an interesting one.

     Dr. Ellinwood was President of, and Professor of Physiology at the Cooper Medical College and Treasurer of its hospital, located at Clay and Webster Streets at the time of the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He was the sole legatee of the past owner of

the school, the successful and wealthy surgeon, Dr. Levi Cooper Lane (1830-1902), who had died some years earlier followed soon

Dr. Levi Cooper Lane (Medical History Center, Stanford,
Creative Commons lic.)

afterward by his wife. They were childless. Ellinwood was left exclusive control of the school’s endowment with the full expectation that he would continue the wise and successful administration that characterized Dr. Lane’s long tenure. Lane himself had re-established the proprietary school begun by his pioneer uncle Dr. Samuel Elias Cooper (1822-1862), and had made it a highly respected and perhaps the most prestigious medical school in the western United States. Lane was highly entrepreneurial and used his wealth to build the Lane Hospital, the most modern hospital of its time and form and endow the famous Lane Medical Library. It was and remains the largest library of its kind in the West. He gathered around him the finest skilled medical faculty in San Francisco to teach and manage the hospital’s wards and clinics. Lane also endowed the famous annual Lane Lectureship, which attracted a series of world-renowned speakers to San Francisco. Lane and his hospital competed successfully with the University of California School of Medicine, then under the direction of Lane’s archrival and one-time AMA President, Dr. Beverly Cole (1829-1901). The Toland Medical College, another proprietary institution, had been given gratuitously to the Regents of the fledgling Berkeley University of California in 1873 by its founder, 49er physician, Dr. Hugh Toland (1806-1880). UC migrated from its Stockton Street origins to Parnassus in 1895 thanks to then San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro’s beneficence, where it later built its own hospital.

     The Lane Hospital, an imposing brick structure with its large auditorium, remained in use on Sacramento and Webster Streets until 1970 with it’s founder’s heart remaining, at his request, in an urn in a prominent place near the podium.

In April 1906, most of the City was destroyed by fire and earthquake and the Cooper College was severely damaged. The Trustees requested funds from Ellinwood to effect repairs and in a contentious meeting in June 1906, Ellinwood as Board President, whose relations with Dean Dr. Henry Gibbons Jr. (1840-1911) were not the best, simply refused to release any money to the school. Nor would he release money to maintain the important Lane Library and annual Lane Lectures.  As can be imagined, the trustees were frustrated and furious but Ellinwood stood firm insisting that the money left to him in the Lane legacy was a personal gift. He insulted them declaring that the quality of the school did not warrant the expenditure of any funds.  The trustees ultimately fired Ellinwood but were advised, considering the terms of Dr. and Mrs. Lane’s wills, that there was no way to break Ellinwood’s absolute control over the endowment. The faculty - all-volunteer in the days before outside funding - and the Lane Medical School and Hospital which they staffed, were left high and dry. Ellinwood kept the money.

     Gibbons as Dean, in desperation and with the approval of the trustees, approached Stanford University to finalize discussions begun several years earlier to turn over control of the school if the Palo Alto institution would maintain it in the City and keep its clinical faculty. Thus began the Stanford University Medical School in San Francisco.

     Stanford continued its significant presence in San Francisco for over 50 years, training a succession of successful doctors with a prestigious world-class faculty. It utilized the Lane buildings and added to them. It also ran a division of the San Francisco General Hospital with distinction until 1959, when consolidation occurred as construction of the new Stanford Medical School and Hospital was completed on the Palo Alto campus.

     At that point the local Stanford San Francisco Clinical Faculty again was faced with a crisis, as most of them had no intention of leaving their San Francisco practices for the hinterland. They also wanted to maintain connections with the hospital where they admitted their patients. For the next several years the hospital sans medical school continued under various iterations and sponsorships until it was re-built and became what it is today, Pacific Medical Center, a prominent and highly successful San Francisco institution, now part of the Sutter Health System.

     The origins of PMC and its hectic history is largely unknown today. Dr. Ellinwood has also been mercifully forgotten except by his descendants who continued to occupy the mansion he built on Pacific Avenue for many years. The Lane name persists as Lane intended: in the form of the fabulous Lane medical library and the annual Lane lectureship, associated with the world-class medical school on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto some 30 miles away from where the story originated.

Arthur E. Lyons MD

Source:

https://lane.stanford.edu/med-history/wilson/chap01.htm

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