Filling a prescription for more physicians: Campbell University is starting a medical school, which will be the fifth--but the first of its kind--in North Carolina.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Water drips at his feet on black-and-white mosaic tile the size of checkers. The smell of fresh paint hangs in the dampness from the downpour outside, and Jim Roberts' voice echoes in the empty lobby. He gestures at the art deco floor. "When we ripped out the old carpet, this is what we found." A large, affable man, he could pass as the football coach of the Fighting Camels as easily as what he is, Campbell University's vice president for business. Renovators wanted to rip out the floor. "I said, 'Wait a minute. This is one of our oldest buildings, built in the '20s. No sir, we're going to leave it.'"

In August, 32 students will begin filing into this 85-year-old building for daily lectures and to pore over bodies in anatomy classes. The inaugural class of physician assistants, a milestone in itself at this school in the state's rural heartland, is a warm-up for a bigger act. In 2013, Campbell will open North Carolina's fifth medical school. It's a bold, $60 million move for a Baptist school that boasts that a larger percentage of its 9,400 students are from North Carolina than any other university in the state. Some 3,900 are on its main campus in Buies Creek, a Harnett County hamlet that relinquished its status as a town in 1967. The medical school will be there. "Buies Creek is Campbell University," says Britt Davis, vice president for institutional development.

Administrators say the medical school is another example of the university's focus on professional education that began in 1976 with its law school, now housed in a renovated, $30 million complex in downtown Raleigh. In 1983, Campbell opened its Lundy-Fetterman School of Business. Its pharmacy school, opened in 1985, moved it into the main channel of North Carolina health-sciences education. Its beginning class of 150 would put the medical school on track to become the second largest in North Carolina, eclipsing those at Duke University, Wake Forest University and East Carolina University and behind only UNC Chapel Hill. The university is considering dental, rehabilitation and nursing schools, too.

Aside from swelling medical academia, the med school could become a crucial bridge in a state where patients have access to some of the best medical care in the world--or die struggling to reach it from isolated counties that have few or no doctors. The N.C Medical Board lists three with none: Hyde, Camden and Tyrrell. Five others have fewer than six. Campbell will recruit students from medically underserved regions, train them with emphasis on primary-care and family medicine, then steer them back home. "When you look at the increase in population, the aging of the physician population in general and the fact that so many physicians go into specialties rather than primary care, it was obvious there was a need for another school," Campbell President Jerry Wallace says.

If the need for more frontline practitioners is a sure thing, Campbell's medical school is nevertheless a multimillion-dollar gamble. It assumes that more than a century of internecine rivalry within medicine has abated--and that the medical teachings of a frontier physician who vowed reform after three of his children died from meningitis will become as widely accepted as those descended from traditional doctors, whose failings he blamed for their deaths.

Campbell's physicians will be trained in osteopathic medicine and have D.O., doctor of osteopathy, after their names rather than M.D., doctor of medicine. Like M.D.s, they will get four years of medical school, followed by three or more years of residency training. Their credentials will be accepted in all states, and they'll be licensed by the N.C. Medical Board and become side-by-side members with M.D.s in the North Carolina Medical Society and North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians. Osteopaths are common in the military. In some states, including Michigan and Oklahoma, one doctor in four is a D.O.

However, they're rare in North Carolina, where only about 3.5% of Tar Heel physicians--811 of the 22,881 practicing in the state last Dec. 31--are doctors of osteopathic medicine. They have struggled for decades to achieve equal standing with M.D.s in a profession in which turf is protected and title is coveted. Though most of their practices and...