First then. First now.
Before we had a country, we had a hospital in Philadelphia. For Penn Medicine, the establishment of Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 became just one of many firsts.
For more than 275 years, Penn Medicine has been where medicine’s most consequential questions get answered. From the founding of America’s first hospital to Nobel Prize-winning science that changed how the world fights disease, our history is a continuous record of discovery that became standard practice.
A timeline of firsts
These are the breakthroughs and milestones that shaped modern medicine as we know it.
1751 | First hospital in America
Pennsylvania Hospital, founded by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond, opened its doors as the first chartered hospital in America, establishing Philadelphia as the birthplace of American medicine.
1765 | First medical school
Penn Medicine physicians, William Shippen, Jr., and John Morgan, became the nation’s first professors specializing in medicine, founding the country’s first medical school and cementing the idea that great patient care and great science belong together.
1803 | First maternity-specific ward of its kind
Pennsylvania Hospital established the nation’s first ”lying-in” (maternity) department in 1803 to care for poor, expectant mothers, setting the stage for modern American obstetrics.
1804 | First surgical amphitheater in the U.S.
Pennsylvania Hospital debuted the nation’s first surgical amphitheater, giving students and physicians a dedicated space for teaching and observation.
1890 | First X-ray image ever produced
Professor Arthur Goodspeed created the world’s first X-ray image, an act of scientific curiosity that gave medicine its first way of seeing inside the human body.
1944 | First mass production of penicillin
Penn pharmacologist Albert Newton Richards played a pivotal role in the large-scale manufacturing of penicillin, turning a promising discovery into a lifesaving treatment available to the world.
1951 | First practical dialysis machine design
Penn medical student William Y. Inouye, M’53, INT’60, devised a dialysis machine out of a pressure cooker. His device was later adopted for worldwide use.
2017 | First CAR T cell therapy
Carl June, MD, invented CAR T cell therapy at Penn Medicine. His research led to the first FDA-approved CAR T treatment for advanced acute lymphoblastic leukemia — teaching a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer.
2017 | First gene therapy for inherited blindness
Jean Bennett, MD, PhD, Albert Maguire, MD, and Katherine High, MD, developed the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited condition, dramatically improving sight in people born with a form of blindness called Leber Congenital Amaurosis.
2020 | First mRNA vaccine technology
Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, invented the mRNA technology that became the foundation of COVID-19 vaccines, earning the Nobel Prize in Medicine and protecting hundreds of millions of lives worldwide.
2025 | First CRISPR gene therapy for rare disease
A child diagnosed with a rare metabolic disease was successfully treated with a customized CRISPR gene therapy — the latest chapter in Penn Medicine’s unbroken record of turning the impossible into the inevitable.