The House Naming Process

Graduating in 1857 from Yale School of Medicine (YSM), Dr. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed was the first African American to be awarded any degree by Yale and the first to earn a degree from an Ivy League medical school.

Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed was a native of New Haven; the grandson of a former slave and Revolutionary War soldier, Prince Duplex; and the son of John Creed, a steward at Yale, and Vashti Duplex Creed, the first African American school teacher in New Haven. Dr. Creed was educated at the New Haven Lancasterian School, the predecessor to Hillhouse High School. After graduation he apprenticed for two years with an area physician, Dr. George E. Buddington.

Dr. Creed matriculated at the School of Medicine in 1854. His thesis, “On the Blood,” explored the chemistry and physiology of blood and is in the school’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library collection. After passing oral examinations and graduating, Dr. Creed practiced out of his family home on Chapel Street and built a large integrated practice of prominent New Haveners.

During the Civil War, Dr. Creed petitioned the governor to serve as a surgeon in the Connecticut Volunteers but was denied due to his race. After President Lincoln authorized the recruitment of African American soldiers in 1863, Dr. Creed was appointed acting surgeon of the 30^th Regiment U.S.C. Infantry and served until the end of the war.

During his career, Dr. Creed was cited in local news and The New York Times for his diagnostic and surgical skills. Throughout his career, he served his community and the profession through his continued medical practice, volunteering with the Connecticut National Guard, and joining the Connecticut Medical Society. Dr. Creed is buried in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery.

A psychiatrist-scientist who revolutionized the field of adolescent psychiatry over six decades, Dr. Beatrix McCleary Hamburg advanced the concept of peer counseling and studied the relationships among stress, coping, and health.

Born in Florida, Dr. Hamburg was raised in New York by her social worker mother and maternal grandparents after her surgeon father died suddenly when she was six. Dr. Hamburg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 1944, having served as a student member of the Board of Vassar. She was the first Vassar student who identified as Black, as previous Black students had passed as white. Dr. Hamburg also became the first African American woman to graduate from Yale School of Medicine, in 1948. She completed a year of residency in Psychiatry at Yale before completing training in pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati and further training in psychiatry at a VA Hospital outside of Chicago.

After working as a child psychiatrist in Washington D.C., Dr. Hamburg joined the psychiatry faculty at Stanford University leading the child psychiatry division. Over the course of her six-decade career, she also held professorships and led services at Harvard, Mt. Sinai, and Weill Cornell.

Throughout her career, Dr. Hamburg focused on preventive approaches to child psychiatry, saying her goal was to “keep as many as children as possible out of her office.” This led her to work in schools. In this setting, she developed peer counseling for students who were struggling. Dr. Hamburg studied the impact of diabetes and teenage pregnancy on children. In 2004, she and her husband David Hamburg co-authored a book called Learning to Live Together: Preventing Hatred and Violence in Child and Adolescent Development. Dr. Hamburg recognized the growth of violence in schools, editing the book Violence in American Schools, which was published just three months before the Columbine shooting.

Dr. Hamburg served as president of the William T. Grant Foundation in the 1990s. She led the President’s Commission on Mental Health during the Carter administration. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Medicine. In acknowledgement of her life’s work, Dr. Hamburg and her husband received the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Award in Mental Health in 2007, and the Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health in 2015 from the National Academy of Medicine, before her passing in 2018.

An internist, pediatrician, epidemiologist, and virologist, Dr. Dorothy Horstmann made the seminal discovery that poliovirus spreads through the bloodstream to the brain, which laid the groundwork for the development of a vaccine.

Dr. Horstmann was born in Spokane, Wash., in 1911, and went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed medical school and internship at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as a year of residency in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt.

Dr. Horstmann came to New Haven in 1942, as a Commonwealth Fellow in Internal Medicine, working with the Yale Poliomyelitis Study Unit to address increasing epidemics of polio with a novel approach called clinical epidemiology. During the 1943 outbreak in New Haven, she started investigating the hypothesis that poliovirus must travel via the bloodstream before entering the central nervous system. She began by collecting blood from 111 patients and recovered virus from only one. Dr. Horstmann then began feeding poliovirus to chimpanzees and found that the virus appeared within days in the bloodstream. This breakthrough discovery confirmed the feasibility of a vaccine.

Following this groundbreaking discovery, she continued to work in polio research and advocacy, pushing for an oral vaccine over subcutaneous injection. She spent six months in the Soviet Union in 1959, when the World Health Organization, recognizing her expertise, asked her to validate massive Soviet vaccine trials of the Sabin live-attenuated oral polio vaccine. Her report, concluding that the trials were conducted with high standards and that preliminary results showed the vaccine to be safe and effective, led to widespread acceptance of the oral polio vaccine.

Dr. Horstmann was appointed professor of pediatrics and epidemiology in 1961 and was the first woman to be appointed as a professor at Yale School of Medicine (YSM). She was also the first woman to be appointed to an endowed professorship in 1969.

Throughout her career, Dr. Horstmann became an expert on many childhood and congenital viral diseases, including rubella, coxsackie, and echo viruses. Dr. Horstmann’s work on rubella was essential in making the vaccine accessible to children in the United States.

In addition to her important research, Dr. Horstmann also made many contributions to clinical education at YSM and the broader profession of medicine. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975 and served as president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Dr. Horstmann retired in 1982.

Dr. George E. Palade, founding chair of the Section of Cell Biology at Yale, discovered the endoplasmic reticulum and ribosomes, elucidated the paths proteins take through the cell, and developed the field of cell biology. In 1974, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and Christian deDuve "for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell."

Born in Romania in 1912, Dr. Palade received his MD in 1940 from the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest and served on the faculty at the University of Bucharest for six years. In 1946, he came to the United States to continue his studies at New York University. While there, he met Albert Claude, who invited Dr. Palade to join him in his lab at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. By 1958, Dr. Palade was appointed professor and head of the laboratory at Rockefeller.

In 1973, Dr. Palade came to Yale School of Medicine, where he established and chaired the Section of Cell Biology. He held the Sterling Professorship of Cell Biology from 1975 to 1983. In 1983, the section became the Department of Cell Biology, and Dr. Palade was named senior research scientist, professor emeritus of cell biology, and special adviser to the dean.

In 1990, Dr. Palade became the first dean for scientific affairs at the University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD) School of Medicine, transforming basic science at UCSD. He retired in 2001.

While at Yale, Dr. Palade was dedicated to teaching and training early-career scientists. He was well-known for his thought-provoking lectures and his ability to summarize complex concepts into digestible formats. His first student, James D. Jamieson, MD, PhD, directed the Yale Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD) from 1974 to 1983, and from 1991 to 2014.

In addition to the 1974 Nobel Prize, Dr. Palade also received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the National Medal of Science, the Gairdner Special Award, and numerous honorary degrees and prizes. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Carolyn Walch Slayman was a celebrated geneticist, national leader in science, and beloved deputy dean of Yale School of Medicine (YSM). Dr. Slayman studied genes that encode membrane transport proteins, and she used model microorganisms such as bread mold and yeast to study transmembrane ion transport.

Dr. Slayman was born in Portland, Maine, and attended Swarthmore College, where she graduated with highest honors in biology and chemistry in 1958. She went on to earn her doctorate in biochemical genetics at Rockefeller University in 1963, the only woman in her class. She pursued postdoctoral work in membrane biochemistry at Cambridge University before joining YSM as assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and the Department of Physiology in 1967.

Dr. Slayman spent nearly 50 years at YSM. She helped establish the graduate program in the Department of Human Genetics in 1972, and served as director of graduate studies in genetics from 1972 to 1984. In 1984, she was named chair of the department (now the Department of Genetics), the first woman to lead a department at the school and the second at Yale University. In 1991, she was appointed Sterling Professor of Genetics.

In 1995, Slayman was tapped as the medical school’s first deputy dean for academic and scientific affairs, becoming the first woman to hold a deputy deanship at YSM. Until her death in 2016, Dr. Slayman oversaw faculty recruitment and set the strategic direction for research. She was instrumental in the development of the Yale Center for Genome Analysis. She led the renovation and modernization of the medical school’s laboratory spaces. She played a key role in the creation of the Yale Combined Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences and spearheaded many institutional grants, notably the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award. Dr. Slayman was best known for her mentorship and impact on many careers.

Outside of Yale, Dr. Slayman was globally recognized for her work in biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 1995, and served on numerous scientific boards and panels, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scientific Review Board and the NIH Panel on Scientific Review.

Yan Fuqing graduated from Yale School of Medicine (YSM) in 1909 and led the modernization of medicine in China as a physician, public health advocate, civil servant, and founding dean of two acclaimed medical schools.

Yan Fuqing was born to an accomplished Shanghai family. His father died of typhoid when he was just six, and he attended the Shanghai American Anglican Church School and the medical college of St. John’s University in Shanghai. He then provided medical care in the mines in South Africa before matriculating in YSM in 1906. Dr. Yan graduated cum laude in 1909, the first Asian to graduate from Yale School of Medicine. His thesis was entitled “A Study of the Cutaneous Method of Von Pirquet and the Percutaneous Method of Moro and a Comparison with Other Tuberculin Tests in Diagnosis of Tuberculosis.”

Dr. Yan returned to China and became the first permanent Chinese member of the Yale-China Association. In 1914, he became the founding dean of the Xiang-Ya (Hunan-Yale) School of Medicine, a collaboration between the Hunan provincial government and the Yale-China Association. Dr. Yan advocated passionately for individuals of Chinese heritage to be appointed to leadership positions at Xiang-Ya. He addressed public health concerns like bubonic plague and tuberculosis and was a leading figure in establishing organizations including the Hunan Red Cross and the Chinese Medical Association.

In the late 1920s, Dr. Yan began planning an academic medical center in Shanghai and became the founding dean of the Shanghai Medical College (now known as the Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University). In 1937, Japan invaded China and Dr. Yan was called upon to address the resulting health emergency by serving as the nation’s minister of public health. He set up medical rescue stations that became the infrastructure for China’s hospital and public health system established after the war ended.

Dr. Yan continued his medical practice, administrative duties, and teaching in Shanghai after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. Due to his social status, Western ties, and Christianity, Yan was not allowed to join the Communist Party. During the Cultural Revolution, his home and property were confiscated. He died under house arrest in 1970 at age 88. By 1978, Dr. Yan was a lauded national hero in China for his contributions to the health of the nation.

Deputy Dean Illuzzi worked with Associate Dean for Student Affairs John Francis, MD, PhD, to convene a committee to narrow the list of nominees and advise the dean on the final selection. The committee included faculty, students, leadership, and medical education staff. Members of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provided research support on the biographies of the nominees. The committee conferred several times with Dean Brown and Deputy Dean Illuzzi as they narrowed the list. The committee focused on selecting individuals whose history and careers would inspire the YSM Community and future faculty and students, while recognizing excellence. After extensive consultation, the dean narrowed the list to reach the final proposed six: Creed, Hamburg, Horstmann, Palade, Slayman, and Yan.