Poznan University of Medical Sciences () is a prominent Polish medical university, located in the city of Poznań in western Poland. It traces its beginnings to the foundation of Poznań University in 1919, and was formed as a separate institution in 1950. It gained the status of university in 2007. History The history of Poznan University of Medical Sciences started in 1919 when a pharmaceutical department was created at the University of Poznań. A year later (in 1920) the Faculty of Medicine was founded within it (in fact, this faculty existed since 1919 as a part of Poznań Society of Friends of Arts and Sciences). The chair of Dentistry was created in 1929. The first rector of Poznan University was and first dean of the Faculty of Medicine was Professor . In the late autumn of 1939, the University of Poznań was closed by German occupation authorities, but many of its professors continued to teach. In 1940 an underground University of the Western Lands was formed in Warsaw which comprised the faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy and Dentistry, with most of the faculty coming from the Poznań University. In 1941, the Polish School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh was founded, where the first dean was surgeon Antoni Jurasz from the University of Poznań. In the last months of the war, during the battle of Poznań, preparations for reopening of the university were begun. The university officially reopened in April 1945, before the end of the war. According to a plan of reform in 1950, the Medical Faculty, with the Department of Dentistry and the Faculty of Pharmacy of University of Poznań, were detached to form an independent school named the University of Medical Sciences. In 1975 a new Faculty of Nursing was founded, and in 1979 a Department of Medical Analytics was opened. In 1984, the Sejm (the Polish national parliament) named the school after Karol Marcinkowski, a distinguished Polish physician and patriot of the first half of the 19th century who had lived in Poznań, and who was a symbol of the highest professional and ethical values in medicine. In 1992 the Faculty of Medicine was divided into Faculty of Medicine I, responsible for the six-year Polish MD program, and Faculty of Medicine II, comprising the divisions of Dentistry, Post Graduate Medical Education and Medicine and Dentistry with English as the teaching language. In 1991, the university introduced