This is the first in an occasional series of profiles of past Columbia University Irving Medical Center leaders.

Samuel Waldron Lambert, the 12th head of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (now the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons), was born in New York City in 1859, one of the eight surviving children of Edward W. Lambert, MD (VP&S 1857) and his wife Martha M. Waldron. Samuel W. Lambert came from a family of numerous Columbia-educated physicians: besides his father these include his brothers Alexander (VP&S 1888) and Adrian (VP&S 1896), his son, Samuel W. Lambert, Jr. (VP&S 1923), and his nephew, the Nobel Laureate Dickinson W. Richards, Jr. (VP&S 1923).

After undergraduate education at Yale (A.B., 1880), Lambert received his medical degree from P&S in 1885.  He then did an internship at Bellevue followed by two years of study in Europe.  Upon returning to New York he co-founded, in 1890 with Dr. James W. Markoe, the New York Midwifery Dispensary, a clinic designed to provide both low-cost maternity care for poor women and obstetric instruction to medical students.  Two years later this was merged into the Society of the New York Lying-In Hospital, which would eventually become the maternity division of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now the Weill Cornell Medical Center of New York-Presbyterian Hospital) when it opened in 1932. Read More→