A Brief Tour

On October 31, MedChi participated in the annual Doors Open Baltimore as the final event. If you think for a second, there was a reason for that... it was Halloween and we have a ghost!

Most of the events for this year's Doors Open were virtual, with only a very few being live, with the caveats of a limited audience and vaccine cards being presented at the venue. Sixteen people snatched up the limited spaces and met at the headquarters of MedChi in Mount Vernon. 

As I gave the tour, I talked about the history of the organization, our buildings and how we acquired them,  key players in medicine, the portraits, and much more. 

But since it was Halloween, I also talked about our ghost, Marcia Crocker Noyes, an accomplished woman who worked at the Faculty for 50 years, from 1896 to her death in 1946. 

Most of the stories are told with a hint of laughter and the feeling that this can't possibly be real, but after hearing story after story over the 75 years since Marcia's death, we can't help but think that her ghost does indeed inhabit our building.

All of the stories are benign, none are malicious, and mostly, they are of glimpses of a person, who on second glance, is not there, or of things being moved, or of footsteps on the stairs up to the apartment where Marcia lived from 1909 when the building was constructed until her death in 1946. 

According to an article in the Brickbuilder Magazine, circa 1912, the apartment had a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bath, and a servant's room and bath. The apartment was also home to Marcia's two chow-chow dogs, including this one called LiLi. 

Several months before her death in November of 1946, a reception was held in Marcia's honor at the Faculty's building on Cathedral Street. 

As Dr. Albert Chatard said at Marcia's retirement about the building they'd created, "Miss Noyes created a reality of the hopes and dreams Dr. Osler formulated while he was at Hopkins… On this foundation, she worked constantly, before and after he left Baltimore, as his understudy to create an atmosphere both effective and genial, so that people would like to come to the building… and would feel that interesting and important things were going on under its roof."

But she was very important and interesting in her own right. For more on the many accomplishments of Marcia Noyes, please click here.