The Academy's more than 2,000 Fellows now include physicians, nurses, healthcare administrators, social workers and professionals in all fields dedicated to maintaining and improving health.
The Academy moved into its current home at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street in 1926. Building on momentum developed during the previous decades, the Academy then developed into one of the country's most effective advocates of public health reform, as well as a major center for popular health education and for lectures and discussions of professional interest.
For more than a hundred years, the Academy Library—one of the three largest medical collections in the United States—has been open not only to all physicians, but to anyone wishing to consult the professional medical literature. To this day, the Academy Library is the only medical library in the metropolitan area open to the general public.
The New York Academy of Medicine has been led by 65 Presidents since its 1847 founding. During that time, the medical and healthcare scene has changed greatly, and the Academy has changed with it. Over the past two decades during the presidencies of Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, appointed in 2006, and Dr. Jeremiah A. Barondess, who led the institution for the previous 16 years, the Academy has reinvented itself into an organization largely devoted to addressing health problems of the urban poor.Its program staff includes leading researchers in health policy, urban epidemiology, and public health; and its team of health educators has provided health education classes at more than seven hundred public schools, reaching over five hundred thousand pupils. The Academy Library has entered the information age with services to Academy staff and Fellows, corporate clients, smaller medical libraries, and—as always—the general public. At the same time, the Library takes seriously its role as the repository of the accumulated culture of health care and biomedical science, sponsoring research fellowships, academic programs, and public lectures on medical history and related fields.
Since 1847, The New York Academy of Medicine has been the leading non-governmental organization in the region concerned with matters of healthcare and health policy, consistently maintaining the highest standards of quality and impartiality. It is fair to say that virtually no endeavor related to health in New York City would have developed as it has, had The New York Academy of Medicine not been here.
Story of Hippocrates
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Hippocrates held the belief that the body must be treated as a whole and not just a series of parts. He accurately described disease symptoms and was the first physician to accurately describe the symptoms of pneumonia, as well as epilepsy in children. He believed in the natural healing process of rest, a good diet, fresh air and cleanliness. He noted that there were individual differeneces in the severity of disease symptoms and that some individuals were better able to cope with their disease and illness than others. He was also the first physician that held the belief that thoughts, ideas, and feelings come from the brain and not the heart as others of his time believed.
Hippocrates traveled throughout Greece practicing his medicine. He founded a medical school on the island of Cos, Greece and began teaching his ideas. He soon developed an Oath of Medical Ethics for physicians to follow. This Oath is taken by physicians today as they begin their medical practice. He died in 377 BC. Today Hippocrates is known as the "Father of Medicine".
Reference
Porter, R., (1994). The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
