Named event or history
The state’s Good Health Plan built a teaching hospital at Chapel Hill; it admitted its first patients on 2 September 1952, and the hospitals and School of Medicine that grew around it made the town a medical center.
53 indexed records are connected with this event.
Narrow the indexed records. Each link opens the search already limited to this event. Counts are indexed records, not copies on a shelf.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Preface -- Historical perspectives -- The deans -- The founding faculty -- The department chairs -- The subspecialty divisions -- The departments evolved from medicine -- Education -- Research -- Other connections -- Ep…
Dated events connected with this event, earliest first. See the whole chronology →
The General Assembly appropriated money in 1947 to expand the UNC medical school at Chapel Hill to four years, enlarge the medical sciences building, and build a 400-bed hospital, a School of Nursing and staff residence halls. The plan grew out of a study commission Governor J. Melville Broughton created in 1944.
People: J. Melville Broughton
North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened in September 1952 with the admission of its first patients, as the core of the new University Medical Center. Its opening allowed the UNC School of Medicine to grow from a two-year program into a four-year school.
Part of North Carolina Memorial Hospital and the medical center, from 1952
A month after the hospital opened, the School of Medicine admitted its first third-year class, beginning clinical training in Chapel Hill. The school had offered only the first two years of medical study since its Raleigh clinical branch closed in 1910.
In 1954 the UNC School of Medicine graduated its first class of students to complete all four years of medical training. The university's new dental and nursing schools graduated their first classes the same year.
UNC A to Z records that the hospital welcomed its 100,000th patient in 1960, eight years after it opened.
The UNC chapter of the NAACP organized a picket in April 1963 to protest that private rooms and certain wards for Black patients at the hospital were still segregated, although outpatient clinics, recovery rooms, pediatrics and the cafeteria had been integrated. Hospital officials opposed the demonstration.
Legislation passed in July 1971 created a board of directors for the hospital and separated it administratively from the School of Medicine, whose dean it had answered to since 1956.
The AHEC program began in 1972 with three regions under an 8.5 million dollar federal contract with the UNC School of Medicine, to train and place health professionals across North Carolina. The General Assembly funded a statewide network of nine regions in 1974, and all nine were running by 1975.
Session Law 1989-141, ratified May 25, 1989, replaced the name University of North Carolina Memorial Hospital with University of North Carolina Hospitals at Chapel Hill throughout the General Statutes and changed the terms of its board members.
The N.C. Neurosciences Hospital opened in 1995 as a specialized hospital within the UNC Hospitals complex in Chapel Hill.
Legislation in 1998 created the UNC Health Care System, bringing UNC Hospitals and the clinical work of the School of Medicine under one entity.
The seven-story, 315,000-square-foot N.C. Cancer Hospital, built with a 180 million dollar authorization from the General Assembly, was dedicated in September 2009. It tripled the space available for treating cancer patients at UNC.
Town figures show UNC Hospitals employed 6,680 full-time and 359 part-time staff in 2010, and the UNC Health Care System, with 7,964 employees, was Orange County's second-largest public employer after the university.
The Chapel Hill 2020 data summary opens with a chapter titled Chapel Hill: A University and Health Care Town, names the UNC Health Care System among the town's three largest employers, and describes its expansion beyond the main campus toward NC 54, the 15-501 corridor and a new UNC Hospitals site in Hillsborough.
Other catalogs, databases, and guides worth searching
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this event; they may not discuss the Orange County event directly.
More to discover
The Friends connects people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
