Brief History of the Department of Physiology

The University of Pennsylvania Medical School originated in 1765 as part of the College of Philadelphia. The founder of the School of Medicine was a young Philadelphia physician, John Morgan. The early faculty, including Morgan, had earned medical degrees at the University of Edinburgh. Due to their training abroad, the University’s founding faculty emulated the University of Edinburgh and, they chose to build their medical school within an institution of higher learning. 

The Physiology Department has its origin in 1780 when Caspar Wistar suggested to the Trustees of the College of Philadelphia that the new medical school should offer a course in the Institutes of Medicine. The title was adapted from a similar department at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, named after the 1706 book Institutiones Medicae by Herman Boerhaave, a comprehensive overview of the medical knowledge of the day. This was the first basic medical science department in the United States and Caspar Wistar chaired the Institutes of Medicine department from 1789-1791. His successor, Harrison Allen., a student of Joseph Leidy, renamed it the Department of “Physiology.”

For more than a century, the pattern of medical education established in 1765, as well as the Department of Physiology, remained unchanged. In 1920, the departmental history became muddled by the establishment of the Graduate School of Medicine (GSM), which had a department of Pharmacology and Physiology. The GSM department, led by Julius Comroe, taught specialty subjects to MDs, physicians returning from WWII, and foreign physicians. Its major effort was to participate in the Correlated Basic Sciences (CBS) course, which was organized around organ systems, a forerunner of the present medical school curriculum.

While Comroe had a significant impact as a teacher, he often sparred with the medical school administration. In 1957, he left and established the Cardiovascular Institute of the University of California in San Francisco. George Koelle was appointed to succeed him, but in 1959 Koelle became chairperson of the school’s pharmacology department. Robert Forster then was named chairman of the new stand-alone Department of Physiology. In 1970, the Physiology departments of the GSM and the School of Medicine were combined with Forster as chair.       

Bob Forster served as Chair of the Department of Physiology of the School of Medicine from 1970 until 1990. The research interests of the faculty during this period were diverse, with strengths in respiratory physiology, membrane transport, and muscle physiology, which remain its current strengths. Paul DeWeer succeeded Forster until 1999 and H. Lee Sweeney served as Chair from 1999-2013.

J. Kevin Foskett became the current Chair in 2013. Currently, Penn Physiology faculty have particular strengths in the molecular biophysics of membrane transport proteins and biological motors, as well as in the cell physiology and integrative biology of transport, motility, signaling and metabolism. The Department employs a wide range of experimental techniques in the fields of cell and molecular biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. It may not be an overstatement to suggest that Physiology enables insights from biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, and pharmacology to be described in an integrated manner that can be applied to human medicine. Much of clinical medicine relies on understanding molecular, cellular and organ-system physiology.

The following is a complete list of the Chairs of the Department of Physiology:

Caspar Wistar                    1789-1792

Benjamin Rush                 1792-1805

Benjamin Smith Barton     1813-1815

Nathaniel Chapman          1815-1835

Samuel Jackson                1835-1863

Francis Gurney Smith       1863-1878

Harrison Allen                   1878-1885

Edward Tyson Reichert     1886-1920

H. Cuthbert Bazett            1920-1950

Carl F. Schmidt                 1950-1952 (Acting)

John Brobeck                    1952-1970

Robert Forster III              1970-1990

Paul DeWeer                     1990-1999

H. Lee Sweeney                1999-2013

J. Kevin Foskett                2013-Present

* Originally the Institutes of Medicine