EDMONTON- The medical school at the University of Alberta is marking a major milestone this year. The Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry is celebrating 100 years of medicine.
On Thursday, hundreds of people came together at the U of A for a centennial celebration.
"Today we come together to celebrate a milestone, meaningful to all Albertans and to many far beyond our borders; the anniversary of the beginning of one of the world's finest medical schools located at one of the best academic health sciences centres in Canada," explained Dr. Douglas Miller, the current Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry.
In 1913, Alberta's first medical school was established at the University of Alberta with a class of just 27 students. Now, it is home to over 2,300 students and faculty members.
"It's remarkable what has happened in some areas of medicine," said Dr. Lorne Tyrrell, former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. "This has been a tremendous school with a tremendous record."
Dr. Tyrrell began as an intern at the U of A in the 1960s and is proud to have lived through many of the medical breakthroughs that have been accomplished at the University.
Over the past 100 years, thousands of Alberta's doctors and world renowned medical researchers have come through the school, doing remarkable work along the way.
"The evolution of cardiology went through the development of coronary care units, and then to start to do bypass surgery, and from bypass surgery to use thrombolytic drugs," Dr. Tyrrell explained. "The mortality of heart attacks has gone from about 25 per cent to five or six percent."
Cancer treatment has also come a long way. Dr. Tyrrell says in the 1960s nearly all children diagnosed with leukemia passed away.
"It was taught that you prepared the patient's parents to lose that child when the child was diagnosed with leukemia, because there was no treatment."
Now, nearly 90 per cent of leukemia patients are cured.
But perhaps one of the biggest medical accomplishments to come out of the University of Alberta in the past 100 years has come in the area of Type 1 diabetes.
"Is there some way you could restore insulin into the body in a physiological way? The Edmonton protocol was the breakthrough that said 'maybe this is possible,'" explained Dr. Tyrell. "In June of 2000, one of the first islet cell transplants was done in the world, that successfully reversed diabetes."
Dr. Tyrrell has high hopes the next 100 years will be as great, if not better, than the last 100.
"We will see huge changes..that will make lives better for all people."
With files from Su-Ling Goh, Global News.
© Global News. A division of Shaw Media Inc., 2013.