I was recently invited to
give a talk at the Annual American Osler Society Conference in Kansas City,
Missouri. Here is my lecture.
I should begin this talk by telling
you that I am a 12th generation Baltimorean on my mother’s
side, so of course, I am biased, and think that Baltimore is the center of the
universe!
The Baltimore where Dr. William Osler
landed in 1889 was a busy and active place, on the cusp, as ever, of
accomplishing great things. With the bounty from the Chesapeake Bay, the
fertile fields of the Eastern Shore, and the coal-mining mountains of Western
Maryland, Baltimore was and is a major import/export center with goods from its
factories, waters, fields, and mountains being sent world-wide, and imports
coming in from around the world.
Between 1850 and 1900, Baltimore’s
population doubled to more than a half-a-million residents. Baltimore was the
second largest immigration point after Ellis Island. Although many immigrants
continued their voyages into America’s interior, many stayed where they landed.
Most were Irish, Polish, Greek, or Italian, and their descendants are still
integral to Baltimore’s many and diverse neighborhoods.
The City embarked on a huge building
campaign in the last 20 years of the 1800s, and the first ten years of the
1900s. New parks, schools, a new city hall (designed by a 22-year old
architect) and municipal buildings were being built, and the city’s footprint
expanded from ten to thirty square miles.
The Port of Baltimore is significantly
farther inland than other east coast ports, so overland transport costs are
significantly reduced. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad connected Baltimore to
cities and states to the west, and steamships opened Baltimore to the world.
Interestingly, the B&O Railroad family circles back around in the Osler and
Hopkins stories.
According to minutes from the Trustees
of Johns Hopkins on September 25, 1888, it was a done deal that Osler would be
coming to Baltimore as Chief of Medicine. The announcement caused quite a bit
of consternation along the eastern seaboard, as both Boston and Philadelphia
were interested in having Osler. Boston assumed he would, of course, go there,
and Philadelphia was shocked that he would actually leave.
It was to be another six months before
he moved to Baltimore from Philadelphia, a distance of just over 100 miles.
This time was filled with consultations, meetings, letters and telegrams,
numerous lectures, and finally, the valedictory speech to medical graduates at
Penn.Osler’s first public oratory in
Baltimore was at the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty’s Annual Meeting on
April 24, 1889. His topic, “License to Practice” alluded to the upcoming
opening of the new medical school at Hopkins and was printed in full in the
Maryland Medical Journal. It ran seven single-spaced, double-column pages!
While there were other, smaller
medical schools in Baltimore at the time, most were second rate, at best. The
Maryland Legislature had recently rejected the establishment of a Board of
Examiners which would ensure that physicians were qualified to practice
medicine.
When the Faculty was founded in 1799
(this is our 225th anniversary year), it was to prevent quacks and pretenders
to the healing arts from practicing medicine. With the poor quality of medical
schools, and the legislature’s refusal to set up the Board of Examiners,
pretenders to the medical arts were once again practicing without oversight.
On Monday, May 7, 1889, the Johns
Hopkins Hospital finally opened its doors with a reception for the public, and
on the following day, it opened to physicians, medical students and
others.
According to the City Directory of
1890, Osler lived at number 209 West Monument Street, just several houses west
of the esteemed philanthropist and founder of Baltimore’s public library
system, Enoch Pratt.
Ironically, the houses along this row, with the exception
of Pratt’s, were torn down in the 1980s to make room for the Maryland
Historical Society’s headquarters.By 1892, Osler’s address is listed at
Johns Hopkins Hospital where he was living while working on writing his book,
along with articles for various medical journals and lectures he gave.
Unfortunately, there are no digitized
city directories for the intervening years, but by 1901, Osler is listed as
living at No. 1 West Franklin Street, directly across from the beautiful and
classic Unitarian Church;
around
the corner from the elegant Catholic Basilica; and just a block from the
Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.Osler was not just a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty,
he was also active at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine.
He
encouraged interchanges between the two sets of faculty members, even
presenting lectures at the University and appearing at the first meeting of
their History Club. He also strongly encouraged the older and younger members
to gather at the Faculty, which was a “neutral ground” between Hopkins and the
University of Maryland. Osler was a great proponent of inter-generational and
inter-institutional learning.
Among Dr. and Mrs. Osler’s closest
friends in Baltimore were Dr. and Mrs. Henry Barton Jacobs.
Dr. Jacobs was one of the early
“latch-keyers” who lived next to Osler’s house on Franklin Street. Mrs. Jacobs
was the former Mary Frick Garrett, the widow of Robert Garrett, President of
the powerful B&O Railroad. Dr. Jacobs’ practice consisted of a singular
patient – Mr. Robert Garrett. Five years after Mr. Garrett died, in an
extraordinarily low-key ceremony, Mary Garrett and Dr. Jacobs were married,
perhaps taking the Osler’s wedding as their guide. Most interestingly, Robert’s sister,
also named Mary Garrett, gave the money to Hopkins to tide it over when it had
financial troubles in its early years, with the proviso that Hopkins would
admit women from the start. The two Marys were on opposite sides politically,
with Mary Frick Garrett being very conservative, opposing both suffrage and
co-education, while Mary Elizabeth Garrett strongly supported both of these
ideals.
In 1896, Osler needed a care-taker for
the nearly-dead library at the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty, where he was
now President. Of course, he was friends with bibliophile, Bernard C. Steiner,
who succeeded his father as the president of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Mr.
Steiner recommended Marcia Crocker Noyes, a bright young woman who worked for
the library in circulation, and he knew she was up for the challenge of this
new position.
Miss Noyes and Dr. Osler became great
friends, and until his death, he sent her special books for the Faculty’s
library. Miss Noyes visited the Oslers several times in England, and she and
Osler kept up a long, warm correspondence.
Although Osler was a homebody who
preferred being with his books and his writings, he was often called on to be a
guest, or a guest of honor, at black tie dinners. In Baltimore, many of these
occasions were held at the prestigious, and until recently, men-only, Maryland
Club, an imposing granite edifice a few blocks from Osler’s house on Franklin
Street.
The Maryland Club was a frequent
gathering place for the men from Hopkins because of its proximity to both the
hospital and the Mount Vernon neighborhood where many of the early Hopkins
physicians lived.
Luckily, there is a menu from a
specific dinner held on May 15, 1904. This menu sold at auction a few years ago
for more than $7,500++. The purpose of the dinner was for George Smith, the
publisher of the 63-volume set of biographies, to present them to Osler. Many
of the “old timers” from Hopkins attended and someone had the foresight to get
everyone to sign the menu, including the reclusive and elusive Egerton Yorick
Davis.
Harvey Cushing’s book states that
after the dinner, a procession of guests left the club and headed towards 1
West Franklin, with barrow-loads of the books for Osler’s library. This is
particularly funny when you realize that there is a steep hill going down and
an equally steep hill rising between the Club and Osler’s house.
Osler jumped into life in Baltimore,
serving on myriad committees, including one to decrease cases of typhoid and
tuberculosis in Baltimore. This could have been, in part, because of his
friendship with Dr. Jacobs, who, after his only patient died, became interested
in caring for those with tuberculosis, and then eliminating it.
Osler and Jacobs established
the National Foundation for
the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (now the American Lung Association), and
Jacobs’ wife founded a hospital for children with tuberculosis in the mountains
west of Baltimore.
Things were coming to a head in 1904,
with Osler traveling across the country and around the world to lecture. Even
when he was at home, he was inundated with people stopping by the house calling
on him. Mrs. Osler had had enough and was worried about Osler’s health if he
didn’t slow down.
But there was one more thing that may
have cemented the Oslers' decision to leave Baltimore.
In February of 1904, a massive fire
ravaged Baltimore City. It started small, but fanned by brisk winter winds, it
spread to the north and east of where it began. Baltimore’s fire department was
not large enough to stop the flames, and they called for engines from
Washington, DC, and New York, Atlantic City and Philadelphia.
It is
hard to imagine the terror the family felt as they knew the fire was coming
closer and closer, and getting bigger and bigger. Cushing talks about Osler
arriving back in Baltimore late on the day the fire started, and briefly
mentioning the fire in his journal. Of course, there were guests at both
Osler’s house and at the latch-key house, and everyone gathered at the Osler’s.
By
Monday afternoon, the fire could be seen through the south-facing windows of
the house. While Osler was generally unflappable, the jingling of his
watch-chain and smoking more than his daily allocation of cigarettes, gave his
nerves away. 22
Flaming
embers were falling on nearby houses, driven by the winds, and the police came
by to tell the household to get ready to leave. The servants got a wagon, and
the family’s most precious items, especially Osler’s books, were packed in
trunks and barrels. The cooks made a final dinner of oyster stew and plenty of
coffee, and Revere was awoken and dressed. But soon after, the winds shifted,
and the fire changed direction. It eventually stopped when it couldn’t jump the
Jones Falls which divided the city into east and west segments.
However,
Johns Hopkins was not as lucky. The University owned a significant amount of
property in downtown Baltimore, inherited from the actual Johns Hopkins, and
much of it was in the “Burnt District” as it came to be known. The Hospital was
set to lose upwards of $400,000 in the money of the day, and it would be a long
time before they recovered financially.
By the
time The Great Baltimore Fire was controlled, a total of more than 1,500
buildings were destroyed, and more than 1,000 were damaged. The fire consumed a
total of 81 city blocks from the harbor to within several hundred yards of the
Osler’s house on Franklin Street. Ironically, the engineers who rebuilt
Baltimore established a club, which eventually found its home in the old
Garrett-Jacobs Mansion.
In just
over a year, Osler and his family had left Baltimore and moved to Oxford.
A few years later, the house on
Franklin Street was demolished for a high-rise apartment. Members of the
Faculty broke into the demolition site and took beams which were later made
into gavels for each of the state medical societies, long-time members of the
Faculty, and other friends.
The
Oslers occasionally came back to Baltimore, and when they did, there was a
whirl of social events, from cocktails with the Cushings, to brandy and cigars
with old friends at the Maryland Club, and elegant dinners with the
Jacobs.
In
1909, the newly built Faculty Headquarters, featuring the central Osler Hall,
was opened with much fanfare and celebration.
Osler had advocated for this new
building for years and wanted it to include an extensive medical stacks library
and a cozy reading room. He gave a brief thank you speech at the opening, and
then attended a grand dinner in the evening. During the remainder of this trip
to Baltimore and the States, he was lavishly entertained by old friends and
colleagues.
Although Osler was
only in Baltimore for 16 years, it was the longest he stayed anywhere and
seemed to be happy living in the city.
We are
honored that he considered Baltimore home, and we still see his influence and
accomplishments everywhere.
Thank you.
Meg Fairfax Fielding
American Osler Society Conference
Kansas City, May 2024
The catering kitchen, which has been around since the 1960s is getting a good scrub and a facelift. Just what's needed at my advanced age, don't you think?
