Chairman's Annual Letter

September 2007,

The beginning of each new Academic Year brings with it a special excitement as new residents, fellows, and faculty arrive.  Most importantly, it is a time of intellectual rebirth for the current staff.  New trainees make us all that much smarter because of the knowledge that must be transmitted and the challenging questions that they ask.

This year our twenty new interns represent seventeen medical schools from across the country. These enthusiastic, energetic, and dazzlingly intelligent young people represent the future of American medicine. Our responsibility is to assure them of the finest training and the best mentorship imaginable, and to turn them into the scientists, teachers and leaders of tomorrow. 

We accomplish this with the most powerful faculty ever put together in a medical center. All the academic i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed, and the environment for learning is superb. Our faculty, fellows and residents will be working with an array of complex diseases as only can be seen in a major teaching hospital in the largest city in the country.  Our facilities for all of this are magnificent. We opened our new in-patient building in 2003, and it has completely changed our ability to provide state of the art care and teaching in a family friendly environment.  

The goals of the Department have not changed for the past 120 years.  We want to be the best place in the world to educate young physicians, provide high quality, compassionate care and advance knowledge through basic science and clinical research.  These are our challenges as well as our mission.  I am proud that we do each of them so well, and am proudest to be able to dedicate our efforts to our new young interns and fellows who put their trust in us just as parents put their trust in our care of their children.