08/25/2026
Stunning history on The Cleveland Clinic, it’s founders, how it began and even its scope today.
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The Cleveland Clinic was founded in 1921 by four physicians who had served together in World War I and came home convinced that medicine should work the way a military hospital did.
George Crile, Frank Bunts, William Lower and John Phillips had seen what happened when specialists collaborated on the same patient instead of practicing in isolation. They built the Clinic around that idea. Physicians would be salaried rather than paid per procedure, they would work in groups, and research and education would sit alongside patient care rather than being an afterthought.
The salaried model is the part that still sets it apart a century later. Cleveland Clinic doctors do not earn more by ordering more, which removes a financial incentive that shapes a lot of American medicine. Contracts are reviewed annually. There is no partnership track and no ownership stake.
The Clinic nearly ended early. In May 1929 a fire broke out in the basement where X-ray film was stored, and the burning nitrocellulose released toxic gas that spread through the building. One hundred twenty-three people died, including one of the four founders. The disaster led directly to national changes in how film was stored and handled.
What the institution became known for is cardiac care. Surgeons there performed the first coronary angiography in 1958, which was discovered partly by accident when contrast dye went into a coronary artery instead of the aorta. That technique made modern cardiology possible. Coronary bypass surgery was developed and refined there through the late 1960s. The heart program has been ranked first in the country by U.S. News every year since 1995, a streak nobody else in any specialty comes close to.
The campus now covers a large stretch of Cleveland's east side, roughly 170 acres, and employs around 80,000 people. It is the largest employer in Ohio.
Expansion went global. Locations in Florida, Nevada, Toronto, Abu Dhabi and London. Patients fly in from around the world.
Cleveland has lost a great deal over the last half century. This is the institution that kept growing while everything around it contracted.
