Located on Spruce Street in the University City section of Philadelphia, Wistar was founded in 1892 as a nonprofit institution to focus on biomedical research and training.

The Institute’s NIH-funded HIV-1 research program leads a consortium of several HIV investigators nationwide who develop and test combinations of novel immunotherapies in clinical trials.

[10] To augment his medical lectures and illustrate comparative anatomy, Dr. Wistar began collecting dried, wax-injected, preserved human specimens.

By the late 1880s, the collection was beginning to show signs of neglect and wear, a problem compounded by a fire in Logan Hall, the University of Pennsylvania building that housed the museum.

[10] The Wistar Institute contains the remaining twenty-two brains of eminent physicians and scientists collected by the American Anthropometric Society.

His vision soon expanded to create the Wistar Institute, which would sponsor and publish new medical research and "any other work for the increase of original scientific knowledge."

At the beginning of the 20th century, The Wistar Institute began to pursue new biomedical research, particularly experimental and investigative biology, under the leadership of Milton Greenman, M.D., and Henry Donaldson, Ph.D.

Between 1905 and 1925, Wistar scientists published 227 original scientific papers, and by 1925, the Institute had solidified its reputation as a center of American biology.