About UCSF

About UCSF

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In both size and number of students, UC San Francisco is the smallest of the nine UC campuses. But its relative size belies its distinction as one of the leading biomedical research and health science education centers in the world. Such distinction does not come without a long history of achievement and excellence, something that few could have predicted in 1873 when the financially troubled Toland Medical College — begun by San Francisco physician Hugh H. Toland nine years before — and the brand new California College of pharmacy agreed to affiliate with the fledgling University of California across the bay. With the addition of the College of Dentistry in 1881, coupled with the move to Parnassus Heights in 1898 on 13 acres donated by former San Francisco Mayor Adolph Sutro, UC San Francisco assumed the geographical outlines of today’s 107-acre main campus just above Golden Gate Park.

This photograph, taken in the Biomechanics Laboratory, shows Dr. Verne Inman (center), Professor Howard Eberhart (right), and __ Henderson (in wheelchair)

Over the lasts century, that original nucleus of schools has grown to include a School of Nursing (1939) and Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute (1942), which contained the city’s first psychiatric hospital, and a Graduate Division (1961) which functions as an administrative unit for the more than 2,000 doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows at this graduate level institution. With more than 15,000 employees and an operating budget over one billion dollars, UCSF also is home to 11 research institutes, 1,500 laboratories, more than 2,000 on-going research projects and a new library whose state-of-the-art computing and communications infrastructure is making it a 21^st century temple of knowledge management.

Setting the Stage

Although the move to the comparative remote Parnassus Heights was somewhat controversial in 1898, it proved fortuitous eight years later when the great 1906 earthquake and fire left many of the city’s hospitals — not to mention the former home of Toland Medical College — destroyed or unusable. UCSF’s location enabled it to offer emergency services to city residents in a makeshift space within the College of Medicine building. The following year, two floors of the building were set aside for hospital services. In 1917, the first UC Hospital opened at the west end of campus; a clinics building followed in 1934.

A recent survey by U.S. News and World report ranks UC San Francisco among the country’s 10 best hospitals. We also have the largest number of doctors in northern California listed in the Pacific Region edition of "The Best Doctors in America." Today’s UCSF Medical Center includes two acute care hospitals (Moffitt and Long) with 560 beds and an Ambulatory Care Center with more than 20 faculty practice and outpatient clinics that together tally more than 325,000 patient visits per year. This is not to mention UCSF-staffed primary care clinics in Santa Rosa, Fresno, Marin, Salinas, Daly City and San Francisco. More than 400 faculty physicians admit and care for patients at the Medical Center each year, as well as supervise approximately 1,300 residents on the main campus, at Mt. Zion (which became part of UCSF in 1990) and the affiliated San Francisco General Hospital and Veterans Affairs Medical Center.