From the beginning, the founders of the Rockefeller Institute had in mind that they would create a hospital of its own. By 1907, the formulation of specific plans for the Hospital was referred to the executive committee, but it was Christian Archibald Herter, with his special conviction that medical research should be associated with patients, who pushed the plan to completion. A graduate of Columbia Medical School, he was among America’s pioneer investigators: he established a private laboratory in New York, where chemistry, bacteriology, pathology, and pharmacology were brought together by a few men whose combined skills embraced all of these fields.

It was originally intended that Herter should direct the Hospital, but by 1908, when it was finally under construction, myasthenia gravis had so weakened him that this was no longer possible. Two other prominent individuals, Theodore Janeway of New York and Rufus Cole of Baltimore, were considered by the board and they decided Cole best represented a promising novel era of the laboratory and clinical study of disease. Herter and the other directors concurred, and Cole was offered the position.

The Hospital officially opened on October 17, 1910. It was a unique institution: nowhere else at the beginning of the twentieth century was there a fully-endowed and equipped hospital devoted exclusively to clinical research with a full-time salaried staff of physicians and nurses engaged in both laboratory and bedside investigations of patients suffering from a few selected diseases. The Hospital was organized on the idea that the clinic itself must become a laboratory.