The Palo Alto Medical Clinic

Today a medical group that shares its doctors, its records and its income sounds ordinary. In 1930 it was a provocation. A young Palo Alto internist named Russel Lee and a few colleagues did it anyway. Their practice moved into a handsome Spanish style clinic on Homer Avenue in 1932. It grew into the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which now runs clinics across the Bay Area as part of Sutter Health.

This page tells that story. The building itself, now the Roth Building, is covered from a visitor's point of view on our Palo Alto History Museum page. Here the focus is on the doctors and the institution they built.

Dr. Russel V. A. Lee

Russel Van Arsdale Lee was born in 1895 in Spanish Fork, Utah. His father was a minister who had moved west to preach to Mormons and later kept bees. According to the Palo Alto Historical Association, Russel came to Palo Alto at 16 with $8, enrolled at Stanford and waited tables to pay tuition. He went on to Stanford's medical school and taught at the university for 42 years.

His name is often misspelled. His papers at Stanford's Lane Medical Library and the historical association both give it as Russel, with one L.

After a few years in San Francisco, Lee went into practice in Palo Alto with Dr. Thomas Williams in 1924, in an office at Bryant and Hamilton. He was restless, opinionated and a born organizer. Over the next half century he would fight the American Medical Association, write state law, found a retirement community and sell the city the land for Foothills Park.

A group practice in 1930

Most American doctors in 1930 practiced alone and billed patient by patient. Lee wanted something different. He believed doctors with different specialties should work under one roof, share patients and pool their income. With five colleagues he formed the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. Accounts give the date as 1929 or 1930. It is often called one of the first group practices in the country.

Wikipedia, drawing on local histories, lists the early partners:

• Dr. Roth, the early partner for whom the clinic building is now named.
• Blake Colburn Wilbur, son of Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur.
• Herbert Niebel and Milton Saier.
• Esther Bridgman Clark, a pediatrician who joined in 1927 and was among the first women doctors on the Peninsula. She later founded the Children's Health Council.

Clark is remembered in the small Esther Clark Preserve in the foothills. Her story also appears on our women's history page.

The 1932 building on Homer Avenue

The clinic needed space and it had a natural architect. Esther Clark's brother, Birge Clark, was the city's leading designer. He drew a U-shaped clinic at 300 Homer Avenue at Bryant Street. The builder was Wells P. Goodenough. The building was completed in 1932.

It looks more like a house than a hospital. Clark used stucco walls, red clay tile roofs and a rustic wooden balcony on the second floor. Below the balcony an arched arcade frames a loggia and an entrance courtyard. It is one of the best examples of the Spanish Colonial Revival style that Clark spread across downtown in the 1920s and 1930s.

The frescoes and the traffic jam

Lee commissioned the Russian-born muralist Victor Arnautoff, a former assistant to Diego Rivera, to paint the entrance. Arnautoff's 1932 series of 17 frescoes, called Modern and Ancient Medicine, set modern scenes of pediatrics, internal medicine, neurosurgery and fluoroscopy against images of medicine in earlier times. Medallions show Hippocrates, Lister, Pasteur and Röntgen.

The unveiling caused a sensation. One panel showed a doctor examining a woman with bare breasts at eye level. The Stanford Daily later reported that crowds blocked the street to look and that Roth threatened to paint over the murals. They survived. Our public art guide calls them the oldest major public artwork in town.

Growth and new ideas

The clinic kept trying things that later became standard. In 1946, before health plans were common, it agreed to care for Stanford students in exchange for a flat fee. In 1950 it became one of the first places in the country to offer radiation therapy for cancer patients on an outpatient basis. Lee also set up the Palo Alto Medical Research Foundation to give local research a home.

The practice soon grew beyond its first building. In 1965 University AME Zion Church sold its original building at Ramona Street and Homer Avenue to the medical group, which later planned to use the land for expansion. The church's preservation fight is told on our African American history page.

Lee's public life

Lee's career went far beyond the clinic. The historical association and his Stanford papers record a long list:

1. World War II. He served from 1942 to 1945 in the Army Air Forces medical corps, rising from major to colonel and heading preventive medicine.
2. National policy. He served on President Truman's Commission on the Health Needs of the Nation in 1951 and argued for prepaid care and national health insurance. The AMA saw his views as heresy. He later remarked that ideas which got him into trouble had become AMA policy.
3. Public health law. He wrote California legislation creating a state bureau to fight venereal disease.
4. Channing House. He was the leading force behind this downtown retirement community, opened in 1962, where residents buy into lifetime medical care.
5. Foothills Park. In 1958 he offered the city 1,294 acres of his hill land for $1,000 an acre. It became Foothills Park, now the Foothills Nature Preserve.
6. Business. His Stanford papers list him as a director of Hewlett-Packard.

Lee died on January 27, 1982, at 86. About 600 friends came to his memorial.

From clinic to foundation to Sutter

The foundation's main Palo Alto campus today is at 795 El Camino Real, near Town and Country Village. Its buildings include the Lee Building and the Clark Building. Our Palo Alto Medical Foundation guide covers the campus today and our healthcare guide covers urgent care and services across town.

Seeing the old clinic

The Roth Building is at 300 Homer Avenue beside Heritage Park. The city has restored it as the home of the Palo Alto History Museum, whose opening was postponed in January 2026 after water leaks. The interior is closed until the museum opens. The frescoes are in the covered entrance gallery, so you can see them from the walkway at any time. The Woman's Club hall at 475 Homer Avenue and the restored AME Zion church on Ramona Street are each a short walk away.

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