[5] After several years based in the Union Hotel, the Hampden-Sydney College board decided they needed a space specifically created for medical education.

The board chose the noted Philadelphia architect, Thomas Somerville Stewart, who had just completed the new St Paul's Episcopal Church, to construct the new building.

This choice was deemed appropriate by the board because it was considered that the origins of medicine went back to the Egyptian physician, Imhotep.

The National Register of Historic Places considers it to be the oldest medical college building in the South.

[8] The building was restored in 1939 by the architects, Baskervill and Son, in honor of Dr. Simon Baruch, an 1862 graduate of the Medical College of Virginia.

The MCV campus has a strong sentimental attachment to the Egyptian Building, and it is the most prominent feature of the VCU seal.

In a world often accused of cold materialism, with an ideology of human self-sufficiency, and an adoration of objects that can be handled and seen, there is a need for things of the spirit, if science is to do more than make life safer, longer and more comfortable.

Several obelisks flank the structure and are connected by a cast-iron fence that incorporates what appears to be hermai, resembling sarcophagi (mummy cases), forged by R. W. Barnes of Richmond.

This message likely represents the fervor with which the public associated Egypt with the child Pharaoh, King Tut (Tutankhamen), who was discovered in 1922, very near to when this interior was remodeled.