Augusta University and the Old Medical College: Medicine at the City's Core
Augusta is a medical city as much as a golf city. Augusta University and the Medical College of Georgia put teaching hospitals, research and thousands of daily commuters at the heart of downtown.
Stand at the Old Medical College building on Telfair Street and you are looking at one of the oldest medical institutions in the South. The Medical College of Georgia was founded in 1828, and its Greek Revival former home remains a downtown landmark — a reminder that Augusta was teaching medicine long before it was televising golf.
Today that heritage sits inside Augusta University, the public research university whose health sciences campus spreads through downtown Augusta. Medical, dental, nursing and allied-health students train alongside the hospitals and clinics of the city's medical district, making health care one of the region's defining industries and largest employment anchors.
The university's presence shapes ordinary city life in ways residents feel daily: students and staff filling downtown housing and restaurants, patients and families arriving from across Georgia and South Carolina, and research programs that bring federal attention — and federal dollars — to the Savannah River corridor. Clinics and teaching hospitals also mean that patients from small towns across two states often meet Augusta first through its medical district, and carry that impression home with them.
Augusta University also fields the Jaguars, giving the city a college-sports identity of its own, and its Summerville campus carries the undergraduate side of the institution under the pines of one of Augusta's oldest neighborhoods.
For a city branding itself to the world each spring, the medical district is the year-round engine. Understanding Augusta means understanding both: the fairways people visit, and the hospitals and classrooms where much of the city actually works.
