[5] Yale School of Medicine faculty have also received various international awards for their scientific discoveries, impactful research, and professional achievements.

Since 1839, medical students have written a thesis based on original research, reflecting that the scientific process of investigation, observation, interpretation of data, and critical evaluation of literature are fundamental to the practice of medicine.

[1] Many medical students take a tuition-free fifth year to pursue additional study, conducting in-depth research or exploring clinical electives and sub-internships.

[10] The school employs the "Yale System" established by YSM Dean Milton Winternitz in the 1920s,[11] wherein first- and second-year students are not graded or ranked among their classmates.

Following his graduation, Dr. Bissell moved to Suffield, Connecticut, a tobacco-farming community where his parents had lived and where he practiced as a country physician for the rest of his life.

The saddlebags that Dr. Bissell carried in his practice, packed with paper packets and glass bottles, are today in the school's Medical Historical Library.

[18] Early in 1942, Louis S. Goodman, MD, and Alfred Gilman, PhD, assistant professors in Yale’s new Department of Pharmacology, began to study nitrogen mustard, an agent that was derived from a lethal gas used in the trenches of World War I.

Building on research that had languished for years, the two young scientists found in a derivative of mustard gas the first effective chemotherapy for cancer.

[20] In the 1960s, Louis Gluck, MD, a member of the Department of Pediatrics faculty, created the first neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

[21] Research led by Yale School of Medicine endocrinologist Kevan Herold, MD, resulted in the Food and Drug Administration's approval in 2022 of teplizumab (Tzield®), a medication that can delay the onset of type 1 diabetes—marking the first treatment to change the course of this autoimmune disease since the discovery of insulin in 1922.

[22] In the field of psychiatry, following pioneering research led by Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist John Krystal, MD, and his colleagues Dennis Charney, MD, and Ronald Duman, PhD, the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2019 a nasal spray called esketamine, derived from ketamine (an anesthetic with rapid-acting effect), for treatment-resistant depression.

[28] On March 28, 2022, Jamie Petrone-Codrington, a former administrator pled guilty to fraud and tax charges for the theft of over $40 million dollars of computer and electronic software.

The affiliated VA Connecticut Healthcare System, located in West Haven, maintains clinical, research, and education programs in conjunction with many medical school departments.