Dean Milton C. Winternitz at Yale

Milton Winternitz led Yale Medical School as its Dean from 1920 to 1935. An innovative, even maverick leader, he not only kept the school from going under, but turned it into a first-class research institution. Dedicated to the new scientific medicine established in Germany, he was equally fervent about "social medicine" and the study of humans in their culture and environment. He established the "Yale System" of teaching, with few lectures and fewer exams, and strengthened the full-time faculty system; he also created the graduate-level Yale School of Nursing and the Psychiatry Department, built numerous new buildings, and much more. It is a loss to 21st-century medicine that his dream of an Institute of Human Relations, envisioned as a refuge where social scientists would collaborate with biological scientists in a holistic study of humankind, lasted for only a few years, before falling victim to the more obvious triumphs of medical science and technology. It is sad, too, that he is remembered largely as a Jew presiding over a medical school that, like most others, restricted the number of Jewish students, rather than for his contributions to American medicine.