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Rush University

Rush University is a private university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1972, it is the academic arm of Rush University Medical Center.

Rush University comprises:

Rush encompasses a 664-bed hospital serving adults and children, the 61-bed Johnston R. Bowman Health Center and Rush University. The campus occupies an 8-acre (3.2 ha) site on Chicago's Near West Side, in the Illinois Medical District, which also includes its teaching hospital, Rush University Medical Center.

Rush University Medical Center dates back to March 2, 1837, when Rush Medical College received its charter. Daniel Brainard founded Rush Medical College in March 1837, two days before Chicago was chartered as a city. It took seven years from the granting of the charter before Rush Medical College opened officially on December 4, 1843—with 22 students enrolled in a 16-week course.

The college is named for Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a Pennsylvania physician, who counted George Washington among his patients. He became a medical and humanitarian leader after the Revolutionary War. He was also a social activist, a prominent advocate for the abolition of slavery, for scientific education for the masses—including women—and for public medical clinics to treat the poor. At his death in 1813, he was the most celebrated physician in America.[citation needed]

In the manner of most medical schools in the 19th century, Rush was a proprietary institution owned and operated by a group of physicians who had joined Brainard in establishing practices in young Chicago. Presbyterian Hospital, Rush's teaching hospital, opened in 1884. Following the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, Rush abandoned its destroyed campus and rebuilt in the West Side neighborhood it occupies today.

By the end of that century, Rush was among the nation's largest and most distinguished medical schools,[citation needed] becoming a major supplier of physicians to rural areas in the Middle and far West.[citation needed] The college sought an academic affiliation with a major university, a common practice among independent medical schools of that era. In 1898, the school affiliated with the University of Chicago. During its first century of operation, more than 10,000 physicians received their training at Rush Medical College.[citation needed]

In 1942, its association with the University of Chicago came to an end, when Rush temporarily suspended its pre-clinical educational program in the face of World War II. In 1956, Chicago's St. Luke's Hospital accepted Presbyterian Hospital's invitation to merge to obtain the critical mass of resources of contemporary teaching medical centers.

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