Ahead of you rises the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine. This is the medical school of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and it belongs to the UAB Health System — described in the record as one of the largest academic medical centers in the United States. The school you face today has branch campuses in Huntsville, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa, and its residency programs extend to Selma, Huntsville, and Montgomery.
Its story reaches back to the 1859 founding of the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile; that college moved to Tuscaloosa in 1920. In 1936 the University of Alabama Extension Center opened in Birmingham, and in 1943 Governor Chauncey Sparks created the four‑year Medical College of Alabama with the passage of the Jones Bill (Alabama Act 89). In 1944 Roy R. Kracke was named dean and began assembling the teaching staff, and in 1945 the Medical College of Alabama was moved from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham and the university’s medical center was founded.
That history culminates here, in the buildings of the UAB Health System spreading beyond this campus today.