Commemorative Naming, Renaming, and the Role of Medical History in Academic Medicine

The University of Kansas School of Medicine recently confronted challenging questions about commemorative naming. Every year, the school assigns the incoming medical students to advising groups, called academic societies. There are six societies, each bearing the name of a prominent physician from the school's history. Over the years, as students learned about the society namesakes, controversy developed over the naming of the Wahl Society. In 1938, Dr. Harry Wahl led an effort to preserve the racial segregation of the medical school. He fought hard, though unsuccessfully, to defend the established practice of barring the few Black students admitted to the school from continuing into the third and fourth year of the program and graduating. In 2017, with this history in mind, a well-organized coalition of medical students submitted a request to change the name of the Wahl Society. The society is now named the Cates Society, honoring Dr. Marjorie Cates, the first Black woman to graduate from the medical school. In this paper, we offer observations on how medical students' involvement with historical inquiry -- as well as their caution about it limits -- helped to navigate the challenging process of renaming.