Although the Division of General Internal Medicine is the most recent addition to the NYU Department of Medicine, three of its components date back to the 1970s and 1980s.

Primary Care

The Section of Primary Care was launched as a division in 1982, when Dr. Mack Lipkin obtained federal funding for an innovative three-year Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program.

The residency program has been in continuous operation since its first four interns were recruited in 1984, and it now enrolls eight residents per year. Fellowship training in Primary Care began with one fellow in 1984 and continued with one fellow per year through 1995, when the program expanded to accept three fellows annually.

Another milestone in the history of the Division of Primary Care was the awarding of public sector support for primary care at Bellevue Hospital in the late 1980s.

Geriatrics

The Section of Geriatrics originated in the early 1970s when two programs addressing the needs of disadvantaged elderly patients were inaugurated at NYU-an outreach program for elderly patients living in single-room-occupancy hotels and a psychiatry outreach program for deinstitutionalized elderly patients with dementia.

In 1979 these two programs were brought together in the Bellevue Hospital Geriatric Clinic as the new Division of Geriatrics within the Department of Medicine. The Geriatric Fellowship Program, begun in 1981, was one of the first such programs in the United States.

Medical Genetics

The history of Medical Genetics within the Department of Medicine at NYU dates back to the 1950s. The department's Medical Genetics program-for many years one of the very few such programs within a department of medicine in the nation-was formalized in the early 1980s as the Division of Medical Genetics under Dr. Rochelle Hirschhorn.

Over the years, the NYU Department of Medicine's early efforts in this discipline produced many seminal results in biochemical genetics, immunogenetics, and cytogenetics. NYU was also the site of the country's first NIH-funded medical genetics training program, established under Dr. Charles Wilkinson (an early mentor of Dr. Hirschhorn) and subsequently led by Drs. Colin McLeod (the discoverer of DNA as the carrier of heredity), Kurt Hirschhorn, and Rody Cox.

A Union

In 2004 the Primary Care, Geriatrics, and Medical Genetics divisions became sections of the new Division of General Internal Medicine, along with the newly constituted Section of Medical Informatics.