A Brief History of UB and the Division

The University at Buffalo is New York's largest and most comprehensive public university. It started in 1846 with a school of medicine founded by three physicians: Austin Flint, James Platt White and Frank Hastings Hamilton as a private institution. Its first chancellor (1846-74) was Millard Fillmore who also served as President of the USA during this period (1850-2). After merging with the State University of New York in 1962, the already mature University at Buffalo was a direct beneficiary of New York's aggressive investment in public higher education and grew in size and ambition. In 1989 it was elected to the prestigious Association of American Universities signifying its arrival in the first ranks of research-intensive universities.

For many years the individual affiliated hospitals ran their own departments of medicine separately until 1968 when Evan Calkins M.D. was appointed as the Chair of the Department of Medicine for the university. He recruited Robert A. Klocke, M.D. in 1970 who started the fellowship program in pulmonary medicine in July 1971 and was named its first Division Head in 1977. With the advent of the new subspecialty, the title of the division was changed to pulmonary and critical care medicine in 1987. Buffalo has been in the forefront of pulmonary and critical care medicine. Howard Dayman was the tuberculosis officer the Meyer Memorial Hospital (now Erie County Medical Center) when he discovered that the limitation to expiratory flow was dynamic compression of the airways. The pacemaker invented by a local engineer Wilson Greatbatch who still active in Buffalo, and developed at the Buffalo VA. The modern oxygen concentrator was developed in Buffalo primarily by another local engineer Norm McCombs who was working with local companies (now AirSep Corp).