"The complete school in touch with the rest of the university represents the normal and correct form. The study of medicine must center around disease in concrete, individual forms. The ease with which the clinic and the laboratories may there illuminate each other is an incontestable advantage to both." Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Boston: The Merrymount Press, D. R. Updike, 1910) p. 72.

As the Great War ended and the nation passed into a prosperous new decade, the single most important issue for the UC Medical School continued to be the problem of the split campus. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, the displacement of the sciences from San Francisco to Berkeley was viewed as a temporary measure. With science instruction ensconced in teaching laboratories at Berkeley while clinical training was centered at the SF County Hospital and Parnassus Heights in San Francisco, students were forced to function in two very different environments. Despite much rhetoric about consolidation of the campuses and frequent pronouncements of plans for change, the rift would continue to plague the medical school and the university until well after the Second World War.

As early as 1911, Dean D'ancona identified the split as a

Dean Arnold D’Ancona

serious mistake, echoing the judgment of the Flexner report that elaborated on the dangers involved in a geographically divided medical curriculum where "busy physicians...[do] not breathe the bracing atmosphere of adjacent laboratories." The UC Regents were aware of the need for consolidation, but preferred San Francisco as the location for the medical school, and in April of 1912, they resolved that the medical school should be reunited in San Francisco as soon as possible. In 1916 they commissioned Dean Herbert Moffitt

Portrait of Herbert Moffitt

to study medical education around the county and draw up a plan for future development of the Medical School at Parnassus. Moffitt's ambitious plan, drafted while the new UC Hospital was under

UC Hospital

construction, recommended that new buildings to house anatomy and pathology be built in back of the new hospital at a cost of $150,000. To house physiology and biochemistry and the requisite student labs, he urged that the old Medical School building be refitted for laboratory instruction and that the outpatient facilities located in the basement be removed to a new building to be erected for this purpose in front of the UC hospital on Parnassus Avenue. With the exception of the nurses' dorm built across the street from the hospital in 1921, little of Moffitt's plan ever came to pass, but it identified and foreshadowed the pressing needs of the Parnassus campus for the next forty years.