A Presentation to the 2018 American Osler Society Conference
In 1888, William Osler
was recruited by the soon-to-open Johns Hopkins Hospital to become the
physician-in-chief, as well as Professor of Medicine at its School of Medicine
in Baltimore. By 1890, he had become a member of the Medical & Chirurgical
Faculty of Maryland, known as the Faculty. Then as now, it is the professional
association for physicians in Maryland.
When Dr. Osler moved
from Philadelphia to Baltimore, one of the things he missed the most was the
access to the library at the College of Physicians, and the camaraderie which
came along with discussing books with his contemporaries. He was determined to
duplicate the experience in Baltimore and envisioned a library which included
not only books on the clinical practice of medicine, but the historic and
biographical aspects of the profession.
This goal began when Dr.
Osler was elected as a member of the Library Committee in 1892. And in 1896, when
he became President of the Faculty, he was determined that the library, a
motley collection of a few thousand outdated books and pamphlets, would become
one he would be happy to be associated with.
Shortly after he assumed
the Presidency, Dr. Osler hired the 27-year old Marcia Crocker Noyes to be the
librarian, replacing one whom he found less than capable. For several years, Miss
Noyes had worked at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore cataloging books,
and she had a certain spark. But most of all, she came with the recommendation of
the head of the Pratt Library, which was located just a block from Osler’s
house on West Franklin Street.
Within two weeks of her interview with Dr. Osler on
behalf of the Library Committee, Miss Noyes had accepted the position of
librarian at a salary of $300 per year, and moved into an apartment in the
Faculty’s building at Hamilton Terrace.
At that time, librarians
were expected to be on call 24/7. A physician could ring up at any time and
request a book. The librarian would search the card catalogue and pull the book
from the shelves. The physician would arrive shortly thereafter, consult the
medical book, and hurry back to his ailing patient.
As an aside, I got to
thinking about physicians calling Miss Noyes until I found out that we have
essentially had a version of the same phone number since phone service started
in Baltimore in the 1880’s!
While Miss Noyes knew
how to catalogue and how libraries worked, she knew nothing about medicine. She
said that she trained herself for the job by just doing it. She was more than
willing to learn, and Dr. Osler was a good and patient teacher.
In the late 1890’s,
there were strong prejudices against a young, single professional female. Miss
Noyes had a lot to overcome to be successful in her position. She was a woman
with no medical background, and some of the physicians, especially the elder
ones, viewed her with disdain. But she was a quick learner, and attended nearly
every one of the Faculty’s events, learning the names of the members, and
asking the wealthier ones for their financial assistance. She begged and
borrowed shelving and furnishings for the library and reading room so that
members would want to gather there.
From a collection of
books in total disarray, in boxes in no particular order and no budget for
supplies, Dr. Osler and Miss Noyes began to build the library. They subscribed
to journals, periodicals and other medical volumes which gradually formed the basis
for the library. With editions arriving almost daily, Miss Noyes created a
system for cataloging the journals and books, which she called “The
Classification for Medical Literature.” It was based on the Index Medicus, and was in place for many
years until the Dewy Decimal System came into common usage.
Because typewriters were
not yet common, Miss Noyes hand-wrote the cards in the catalogue. For each book
there were two: one filed by subject and the other by author. She wrote in
“library hand” which was “a slight back-hand,
with regular round letters apart from each other.” It was the standard for
card catalogues, with the emphasis on legibility and not haste. As you might
imagine, hand-writing the cards took an incredible amount of time.
During his year as
President of the Faculty, Dr. Osler founded the Book & Journal Club, which
met until his move to Oxford. He took great pleasure in spending time in the
Faculty’s reading room, as his keenest interest lay in books. He could often be
seen there in the evenings and on Saturdays, reviewing the latest journals,
talking with old and young physicians alike and encouraging a dialogue between
the two groups.
The Hamilton Terrace
building had been purchased in 1893, but it was not at all adequate for the
library that Dr. Osler and Miss Noyes imagined. So the plotting to construct a purpose-built
headquarters and library began.
Unfortunately, planning
was sidelined in 1904 by the Great Baltimore Fire which destroyed nearly all of
downtown and came within two block of the Osler’s home on Franklin Street. And
in 1905, Dr. Osler announced that he had taken the position of Regius Professor
of Medicine at Oxford. He and his family moved in May of that year.
In 1904, the AMA revised
the structure for medical societies, and Miss Noyes was named the Faculty
Secretary, a huge accomplishment for someone so young, and a woman at that! She
managed the membership, kept up with her duties as librarian and organized all
of the meetings for both the small societies and the entire membership. And she
was still on-call 24/7!
Dr. Osler’s name opened
doors for the young librarian who would become one of the leading forces of the
Medical Library Association (MLA), of which he had been a founder in 1898. The
MLA only flourished in its early years because Dr. Osler was the President and
Miss Noyes was essentially its Director.
They both realized the
importance of having professional medical librarians and establishing that as a
viable career. They created an exchange so that each library did not have to
subscribe to every medical journal and they could be traded back and forth.
This eventually added up to several hundred trades each month! While originally
founded in Philadelphia, the MLA moved to Baltimore for several years, so that
Miss Noyes could shepherd it more closely.
It was a great tribute
to Miss Noyes and her incredible executive skills that in 1934, she was named as
the first non-medical President of the MLA. It was during this period, that she
finally incorporated the organization. Two years after her death, the Noyes
Award was established for outstanding achievement in the field.
While there was
tremendous professional respect between Miss Noyes and Dr. Osler, they also had
a close and warm friendship. He often sent her nosegays and flowers with little
notes, and when he left for Oxford, he presented her with a huge bouquet of
flowers. MedChi continues the tradition of giving flowers with a bouquet being
presented to the winner of the Marcia Crocker Noyes Award at the annual Medical
Library Association Conference.
The library endured and
grew, and in 1905, when Dr. Osler left for Oxford, nearly 15,000 books were in
the collection, now housed in a building adjacent to the headquarters on
Hamilton Terrace.
But there was no room to
grow and the plotting for the new building continued. With Dr. Osler’s help and
guidance from a distance, Miss Noyes encouraged the Faculty’s members to begin
a building campaign. Eventually a plot of land was purchased just a few blocks
from Hamilton Terrace. Miss Noyes and the Building Committee visited medical
society buildings in Boston, New York and Philadelphia so that they could get
ideas of what they did and didn’t want.
After Dr. Osler’s move
to England in 1905, he supported the library with contributions of both common
and rare books, as well as financial donations. He was constantly thinking of
the catalogue of books at the Faculty, frequently writing to ask if Miss Noyes
had this book or that in the collection. When he found special books, including
a copy of Vesalius’s Anatomy, he made gifts of the volumes to the Faculty
Library. The Vesalius sold at auction for around a half a million dollars in
the early 2000’s.
In 1908, ground was
broken for the new building, and Miss Noyes had her hand in every aspect of the
construction. She visited the site frequently, and could be found inspecting every
part of the building. After all, not only would the new building be her
workplace, it would also be her home. An apartment was built on the top floor, which
was essentially the first penthouse in the city. She lived there with her maid
and her two chow-chow dogs. As she grew older, an elevator was installed for
her convenience. Over the course of the building’s first decade, the first two
levels of the stacks were built, followed later by an additional two floors as
the collection grew.
At Miss Noyes’ request, Dr.
Osler came to Baltimore for the dedication of the building, the main room of
which bore his name. He
writes in this letter just a few days after the dedication “The building is
just perfect – never been so pleased with anything in my life.”
Miss Noyes visited Dr.
Osler in England, and he returned to Baltimore for visits to Hopkins and the
Faculty. For the next ten years, the now Sir William sent books that he’d found
on his travels.
Dr. Osler writes about
the importance of his association with the Faculty’s library in the
introduction to his “Bibliotheca Osleriana”, and mentions Miss Noyes by name. “My colleagues
in the old Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland soon
found that I was really fonder of books than of anything else… That my name is
associated with the hall of the faculty… is a touching tribute of affection
from men who knew me and whom I loved. We owe much to Miss Marcia Noyes, our
first whole-time librarian…”
Miss Noyes and Sir
William kept up their correspondence until a few months before his death,
thought to have been hastened by the death of his beloved son, Revere in 1917.
The library eventually
numbered more than 65,000 volumes, including medical journals from every state
medical society and specialty society, and from many foreign medical societies
for most of the 20th century.
Even after Sir William’s
death, the connection continued with Miss Noyes’ long friendship with Sir William’s
nephew, W.W. Francis whom she had met when he lived for several years with Dr.
Osler in Baltimore.
Mr. Francis was
responsible for cataloguing and then transporting Sir Williams’s books to their
final home at McGill University. Later, both Mr. Francis and Miss Noyes were
active in the MLA and corresponded about books and other things for many years.
The Osler Library at
McGill and the Library at the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland
remained closely affiliated until Miss Noyes’s death in 1946. The relationship was rekindled last summer with my trip to Montreal, McGill and the Osler Library.
While Dr. Osler taught
Miss Noyes about medicine and science, he was also a role model in her
management style and her outlook on life. Like Dr. Osler, she attracted the
complete loyalty of others. When Miss Noyes retired after 50 years, the
Faculty’s newest employee had been there for 14 years.
And like Dr. Osler, she
was quick to give others credit when things went right and ready to take the
blame when they didn’t. Both of them had as their life’s work to improve the profession
of medicine. Osler did this through the practice of medicine and Miss Noyes did
it by making her medical library the best of its time.
Miss Noyes said that by
making a living, she made a life. The
same could be said for Sir William Osler.
That is the end of my prepared remarks, but I am going to
tell you something that was inferred during my introduction, and that I am too
superstitious to write down: We have a ghost and her name is Marcia. As I
mentioned, Miss Marcia Noyes worked at the Faculty for 50 years, and she lived
on premise for that entire time. Some say that she never left. I am among
those.
There are so many things that happen that can’t be explained
any other way. I find paintings in the stacks that I KNOW weren’t there days
earlier. People her footsteps on the long stairway to Marcia’s former
apartment, when they know that they are alone in the building.
Several years ago, when we set up a little fund to give a
bouquet of flowers to the winner of the Noyes Award at the MLA meeting, I went
up to the top floor of the stacks. I wanted to tell Marcia, because we call her
by her first name, that we were doing that, in memory of the way the physicians
honored her by giving her flowers. I had to say it out loud, because I was
pretty certain that she couldn’t read my mind. Once I finished telling her what
we were doing, I heard something like a pencil drop. The hair on my arms stood
on end! I got goosebumps, like I have now! I zoomed down the four flights of
stairs completely freaked out!
So, you see, Marcia continues to have an impact on her
beloved Faculty!
