MUSC history subject of ETV documentary“Building the Dream,” a one-hour history of the Medical University of South Carolina, premieres Friday, Oct. 8 at 9 p.m. on South Carolina Educational Television.The story starts in 1774 with a Pennsylvania doctor named David Ramsay who arrived in South Carolina with a dream of building a medical school in Charleston. The documentary tells the story of how this dream culminated two centuries later into one of the great teaching, research and health care institutions in the nation The story is told through the extraordinary men who faced almost insurmountable odds—men who triumphed in the face of war, natural disaster, economic depression, and political turmoil. It is told in the context of the history of the time—the Southern slave trade, plantation life, the Civil War, the Flexner Report which eventually closed half of the medical schools in the nation, and World War II. The concluding, modern day analysis of the institution is a tribute to James B. Edwards, DMD, who is about to retire from the presidency of the Medical University of South Carolina, a position he held since 1982. Edwards, an oral surgeon by training, brought his experience as a former S.C. senator, a former S.C. governor, former U.S. Secretary of Energy to lead the university through an unprecedented period of growth. Cynthia K. Tew of the Public Relations Department of the Medical University
is executive producer of the project. IVS in Charleston handled production,
with Liz Oakley acting as writer/producer and Ed Bates, as videographer
and editor. W. Curtis Worthington Jr., M.D., professor of history of the
health sciences and director of the Waring Historical Library at MUSC,
is the on-air historian for the project.
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