Huntington Williams, M.D.

Several months ago, I was lucky enough to get an intern to help me unpack and catalogue 73 boxes of books and ephemera which we had gotten from the Maryland Center for History and Culture. I had met Caroline Williams at a small lunch and invited her to come visit MedChi. In the course of our conversation and tour, I asked if she'd like to come work for us as an intern, and she accepted. She's off to graduate school now, but wrote this blog post before she left. Thanks for everything, Caroline!

Huntington Williams, M.D.
By Caroline G. Williams

When I started to work at the Maryland State Medical Society this Spring, helping Meg Fairfax Fielding and the MedChi team organize over 70 boxes of medical archives, I had no idea that I would discover that some of its pre-eminent members were part of my family's story, including my great-grandfather, Huntington Williams, M.D.

At the time of meeting Meg, I was finishing up a project that I began in March of 2020, when COVID-19 was declared as a National Emergency.

Instead of staying in New York City, which was hard-hit by the pandemic, I took the Amtrak train to Baltimore and spent the next 15 months working remotely from my parents' home.

In my spare time, I started to unpack over 30 cardboard boxes filled with family documents that had been kept in the storage area of the basement. The boxes had been unopened for decades, and the documents dated back to the 1600s. They included early daguerreotypes, old black-and-white photographs, drawings, love letters, correspondences, diaries, calendars, genealogical records, banking documents, receipts, newspaper clippings, academic notebooks, medical books, and scientific publications.

I was fascinated by the material and began to organize it into an archive. Much of the material had been assembled by Huntington Williams M.D. (1892-1992), and his wife, Mary Camilla McKim. He was the Health Commissioner of Baltimore from 1931 to 1962, and his role models and mentors in the field of public health included influences such as Sir William Osler, William H. Welch, and Henry M. Hurd. Osler, Welch, and Hurd were pioneers of modern American medicine. They were also devoted to MedChi's mission. Osler was perhaps the most famous. He came to Baltimore from Canada and was one of the Big Four founders of Johns Hopkins Medicine. He left in 1905 to become the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford.

William Welch, the pathologist, had perhaps the most enduring influence on American medicine. He was instrumental in founding the School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1918, getting the Rockefeller Foundation to give the money for the first school of public health in America to Johns Hopkins University instead of Harvard.

Henry Hurd is perhaps the least well-known. He was the first Director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He kept the trains running on time, made sure that Osler and Welch and other doctors at Hopkins published all of their medical findings, and was a surrogate father to my great-grandfather, hosting him and his family for Sunday lunch at the Hospital every week during his childhood, after Huntington’s own father, George Huntington Williams, died of typhoid fever.

A number of documents and photographs in my family's archive had the names Osler, Hurd, and Welch on them, but, at the time, I had no understanding of who these individuals were, and I definitely did not know how or why they were important to modern medicine.

That changed when I began to organize and publish the material. And it really changed when I was invited to a lunch and met Meg Fairfax Fielding, the head of the History of Medicine in Maryland, in the Spring of 2023, and learned that MedChi needed to unpack and organize over 70 boxes of medical archives.

The time I had spent with the family archive was just the first round of what I was about to experience at MedChi.

When I arrived at MedChi, Meg showed me the exhibit space that will be used when MedChi’s new museum launches in 2024. The first exhibit I saw was a wall of bookplates of MedChi members who collected books and donated some or all of their collection to the Society.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the bookplate of my great-grandfather, Huntington Williams M.D.

Huntington Williams, M.D. trained in the field of public health because his father, George Huntington Williams, died of typhoid fever he contracted during a field trip in Western Maryland; and typhoid fever was a preventable disease. George Huntington Williams was the first professor of geology at Johns Hopkins and trained the first generation of geologists in this country. He was instrumental in getting William Welch to come to Johns Hopkins in the early days of the University. Sir William Osler took the train from Baltimore to Utica, New York, to try to save his life when he fell ill. When the School of Hygiene and Public Health opened its doors in 1918, the Spanish Flu epidemic was raging, William Welch was sick with the flu, and Huntington Williams, M.D. was on the front steps waiting to get in.

William Welch later played a role in my great-grandfather getting his first job as a District Health officer in New York State and helped bring him back to Baltimore as the City Health Commissioner in 1931.

I learned all this from my great-grandfather's memoir, which is part of the family archive, and from helping MedChi unpack and organize its own book collection and archive, which will be part of the Society's Museum launch in 2024.

I hope you come visit the Rare Book Room exhibit in 2024. I have had the pleasure of working on the project and hope you enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed putting it together.  

In the words of Huntington Williams M.D.:

“Books have always been at the very center of my personal interest; I began collecting them at a very early age. This interest developed because I have an insatiable curiosity… My father influenced me in ways that I can’t even remember, but I’m conscious of this as a solid fact…Growing up in Baltimore I often talked to family members and to a number of close family friends older than myself who had known my father well. They were mentors to me, especially Dr. Henry M. Hurd and Dr. William H. Welch. With others, they helped shape my views about life and eventually my career... Dr. Hurd was a very remarkable hospital director. In the days of Dr. Welch and Dr. Osler, when they were doing their finest research work here at Hopkins, he was the man who saw to it that these world leaders in medicine produced the texts of their addresses and papers. Otherwise, this knowledge would have been lost to prosperity. He published these texts in the Hopkins Hospital Bulletin... Dr. Hurd, Dr. Welch, and Dr. Osler were all great founders of public health in this country."

You will be able to read books published by or about all of these doctors and more! 

Thanks, Caroline!