Some of our gentlemen would like to send you all of their very best wishes for this festive season.
Thomas Hepburn Buckler, M.D.
Daniel Coit Gilman
Samuel Stringer Coale, M.D.
Lewis Sydenham Hayden (son of Horace Hayden, M.D.)
From all of us at The Center for a Healthy Maryland!
MedChi was founded in 1799 to “promote and disseminate medical and chirurgical knowledge throughout the State and in future prevent the citizens thereof from risking their lives in the hands of ignorant practitioners or pretenders to the healing arts”.
You might think that it would preclude someone like this from practicing medicine!
There’s been a mystery swirling around about one of our paintings. Surprise, right? It holds a place of pride above the fireplace in the Krause Room. 
However, the notation there wasn’t much help. It said the painting was of either JP or JR Smith, and the painter was listed as ECB. With a search through the 1961 acquisitions log, I found that the initials were still in question, but that the painter was identified as Edward Caledon Bruce, a Virginia artist and writer. With that information in hand, I found that the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia had a collection of Bruce’s paintings.
An email to the museum lead me to Nick Powers, the Curator of Collections. He happened to be coming to Baltimore on another matter, so we agreed to meet so he could look at the painting.
We took the painting down, and Nick had a chance to study the back of the painting where he discovered many little clues, which I had overlooked. The painting was signed in two places, and the sitter’s name and date was marked on the back. The stretcher had little notches in the corners indicating how it was to be put together.
But that still left the mystery of who the sitter was. There was a note in an old Maryland Medical Journal talking a bit about the painting, which was given to Marcia Noyes on her retirement.
Upon her death, only months after receiving the painting, Marcia left it to MedChi, and it’s been in a prominent place ever since.
Although I searched some of the library committee’s records, I wasn’t able to find out where the painting came from, or any more about the sitter.
Nick and I speculated about who the sitter was, and in a late night e-mail, I received this information from him, via his father, a physician and medical historian in Virginia:
I am very pleased to tell you that his full name was Dr. John Philip Smith, and he was a founding member of the medical college here in Winchester, which I mentioned this afternoon. He was born in Virginia in 1822, and died in Clarke County, Virginia, in 1884. During the Civil War he was a surgeon in the 2nd Virginia Infantry. I wasn't sure it was him at first, until I noticed that his eyes skew apart as in the portrait.
Birth: Jan. 27, 1822 Virginia, USA
Death: Dec. 29, 1884 Clarke County Virginia, USA
Father: Philip Smith
Mother: Louisa Collier Christian
Now the only mystery that remains is how did Marcia come to find this painting and acquire it.
Thanks to F. T. Hambrecht, J. L. Koste, and Bob Krick for the information.
We have a collection of about 110 paintings here at MedChi. And I am using the word “about” because I am not actually exactly sure how many paintings we have. The number seems to fluctuate a bit.
Some bright thing took all of the plaques and plates off of a number of our pictures, so I have essentially spent the past year and a half working to figure out which painting is which. I have a huge spreadsheet where I am keeping track of the paintings, where they are located, and who the artist is. There are multiple colors and notations that help me track the portraits.
I refer to a catalogue of acquisitions that was created in 1961, in which numbers were assigned to all of the paintings, and also to the 2002 Sotheby’s appraisal of our collection. Regrettably, neither of these documents has images of the portraits.
I’ve worked on the portraits project on and off over the past 18 months, mostly when I have a few hours of spare time (ha!). But I’ve got a deadline of the end of January to have museum-style signs made for all of the portraits, so I am working to identify everyone and write brief biographies of them.
This is easier said than done! I am still not 100% on who each of the portraits represents. And funnily, I still find a painting here or there, mainly in the Stacks. Although I’ve spent dozens of hours in the Stacks, things still “appear”, most recently, this picture frame.
I have been known to wander around the building with a spread-sheet and a measuring tape trying to tease out which unknown painting might become known. And sometimes I find this out in unusual ways.
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