History
The Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn traces its origins to 1895 when the William Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine, the nation’s first fully equipped laboratory for routine and investigative work, was founded with the purpose “to promote the interests of the patients in the … University Hospital by the prosecution of minute clinical studies and original researches.” Prior to the founding of the Pepper Lab, the Medical School had moved west from downtown Philadelphia across the Schuylkill River to its present site and erected the first university hospital in the United States in 1874. Dr. James Tyson, whose 1881 Textbook of the Practice of Medicine straddled the disciplines of Anatomic Pathology, Laboratory Medicine and Clinical Medicine as they are known today, became the university’s first Chair in Pathology in 1877.
