The old make-shift hospital on the Campus was enlarged in 1876, but it was never able to overtake the ever-increasing demand, and a new building eventually became imperative. This came in 1891, when the present Hospital, soon fated to go the way of the first, was erected northeast of the Campus on the hills above the Huron River. Designed to accommodate about eighty patients, it has been enlarged again and again, until finally in 1919 the State appropriated over a million dollars for an entirely new building, which will cost eventually three times that sum, to be completed in 1922. Not only will this new Hospital accommodate nearly six hundred patients under the far more exacting requirements of modern hospital practice, but it will also be by far the largest hospital controlled entirely by a medical school and maintained for the sole benefit of the people of a state.
The medical course was finally increased in 1890 to four years of nine months, while the entrance requirements were placed on the same basis as the admission to the classical or scientific courses in the Literary Department. At the same time a "combination" course enabled the student to graduate from both the Literary Department and the Medical School in six years. The final evolution of the curriculum up to the present time came in 1914 when this combination was made compulsory. This meant that at least two years' preliminary work in the Literary College was required before the student was permitted to enter the Medical School. In 1903 a new Medical Building was completed at a cost of about $200,000, to provide the class rooms and laboratories for the work of the first two years. It contains two amphitheaters, two lecture rooms, and the laboratories of hygiene, bacteriology, physiological chemistry, anatomy, histology and embryology and pathology, as well as the pathological museum. To the great regret of many medical alumni, and in fact all who loved the relics of the University's first days, the picturesque old Medical Building with its simple Greek portico was razed in 1914. It had been considered unsafe for some time, and stood abandoned and unused at one side of the new building.
Although the original University Act called for a Law Department, and even gave it first place in their scheme for organization after the Literary College, the favorable time for its establishment did not appear for nearly twenty years. There were already a number of law schools in operation elsewhere, one of them at the University of Pennsylvania dated as far back as 1790; but for the most part legal education was haphazard and primitive. Candidates for the bar ordinarily prepared for practice by reading in a lawyer's office, a good old method that perhaps has some merits, but one which did not, save in the case of a teacher of exceptional qualifications, give a uniform preparation or an insight into the principles of legal philosophy. As the general level of education advanced, however, the advantages of some systematic instruction in law became more and more apparent, and it was not long after the establishment of the University before demands for a Law School began to be heard. This sentiment grew, in spite of the conservatism, and even active opposition, of the lawyers of the old school who believed the established office method of education the only practical one.