The building provided a new home for The New York Academy of Medicine, founded in 1847 to advance medical science and promote health in New York City. The Academy also holds a medical library, one of the largest in the city and open to the public since 1878.

The Academy's building is an Art Deco interpretation of the Romanesque. The main portion of the building is six stories faced in limestone and sandstone, with the façade enlivened by Latin inscriptions on health and medicine, and the figures of Aesculapius and Hygeia carved above the door, flanked by regal lions.

The interior features fanciful figures of plants and animals central to medicine, as well as a Renaissance tapestry. The original building was designed for offices, meeting spaces, a 550-seat auditorium, and the library, including a dramatic library reading room-now a public event space overlooking Central Park-and nine floors of stacks.

A rare book reading room and additional offices were part of a 1933 renovation, with six additional floors of stacks added in 1953.

Presently, the Academy of Medicine has over three-thousand fellows. Its rare book room is open to the public by appointment and includes some oddities among its collection of over 500,000 books, pamphlets, and ephemera. This includes rare work by Sigmund Freud, the Edwin Smith Papyrus (the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma), and an 1862 "bezoar," a fur-covered stony mass extracted from a cow's stomach.