Chaim Sheba and the Establishment of Tel-Aviv University Medical School

The story of the establishment of Tel-Aviv's medical school gives us a glimpse into broader and deeper processes that shaped medicine and medical education in Israel in its first decades. In this article we will examine the arguments raised by Chaim Sheba and the champions of the struggle for the need for a second medical school; we analyze the political and public levers applied by Sheba such as proposals to reduce the ethnic gap and to support the agricultural hinterland. In the first section of the article, we trace the origins and context of Sheba's vision of training human and veterinary physicians together. In the second section, we survey five main phases of Sheba's campaign to open a medical school between 1954 and 1964. Lastly, we summarize and analyze the success of the struggle in terms of its initially declared goals.