The medical center was built in the 1920s on the site of Hilltop Park, the one-time home stadium of the New York Yankees. The land was donated by Edward Harkness, who also donated most of the financing for the original buildings. Built specifically to house a medical school and Presbyterian Hospital, it was the first academic medical center in the world. Formerly known as the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC), the name change followed the 1997 formation of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, a merger of two medical centers each affiliated with an Ivy League university: Columbia-Presbyterian with Columbia University, and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, with Cornell University's Weill Cornell Medical College.
The Medical and Graduate Education Building was designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler and the structural engineer was Leslie E. Robertson Associates.[1]
In September 2016, the campus was renamed as Columbia University Irving Medical Center, for one of the hospital and the university's largest benefactors, Herbert and Florence Irving.[2] Herbert Irving was a co-founder and former vice-chairman of Sysco.
The hospital completed the first successful heart transplant in a child,[3] the first use of the anti-seizure medication, dilantin, to treat epilepsy,[4] and the isolation of the first known odour receptors in the nose.[5]
The institution supported discoveries related to how memory is stored in the brain, and Nobel Prize-winning developments in cardiac catheterization (1956) and cryo-electron microscopy (2017).[6]
On July 25, 2023, former Columbia OBGYN Robert Hadden was sentenced in federal court to concurrent 20-year sentences for enticing and inducing women, including one minor, to travel to his offices from other states to engage in illegal sex acts.