 Starting in 1878 , Cornell 's Ithaca campus offered a pre @-@ medical school curriculum , although most medical students enrolled in medical school directly after high school . In 1896 , three New York City institutions , the University Medical College , the Loomis Laboratory and the Bellevue Hospital Medical College united with the goal of affiliating with New York University ( NYU ) . Unfortunately , NYU imposed a number of surprising new policies including limiting faculty to what they would have otherwise earned in private practice . The faculty revolted in 1897 and sought return of the property of the three former institutions , with a resulting lawsuit . On March 22 , 1904 and April 5 , 1904 , the New York State Court of Appeals ordered NYU to return property to Loomis Laboratory because the NYU Dean had breached oral promises made to form the merger . Having won their separation from NYU , the medical faculties sought a new university affiliation , and on April 14 , 1898 , Cornell 's Board of Trustees voted to create a medical school and elected former NYU professors as its Dean and faculty . The school opened on October 4 , 1898 in the Loomis Laboratory facilities . In 1900 , a new campus on First Avenue on the upper East Side of Manhattan opened which was donated by Oliver Hazard Payne . Cornell also began a program in the fall of 1898 to allow students to take their first two years of medical school in Ithaca , with Stimson Hall being constructed to house that program . The building opened in 1903 . The M.D. degree program was open to both men and women , but women were required to study in Ithaca for their first two years . In 1908 , Cornell was one of the early medical schools to require an undergraduate degree as a prerequisite to admission to the M.D. program . In 1913 , Cornell 's medical school affiliated with New York Hospital as its teaching hospital . Unlike the New York branch of the medical school which was well endowed , the Ithaca branch was subsidized by the University , and the Trustees reduced its scope to just first year students in 1910 , and eventually phased it out . 
