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!

Recent Finds

I was poking around the stacks the other day with our summer intern, and because she's taller than I, she was helping me pull out some of the folio size books on the upper shelves. These tend to be the books illustrated with beautiful engravings. So, I thought I'd share some of the more interesting illustrations, created in 1771 and 1784.

I have to confess that I am completely fascinated by engravings. The skill it takes is incredible. Here's how an engraving is made: 

Engraving is an intaglio printmaking process in which lines are cut into a metal plate in order to hold the ink. In engraving, the plate can be made of copper or zinc. The metal plate is first polished to remove all scratches and imperfections from the surface so that only the intentional lines will be printed. Ink is applied and then lightly wiped off so that it only stays in the carved lines. Paper is applied and with pressure, the ink transfers to it. 

It's the engraving into metal or stone that impresses me, and the skill which it takes to accomplish creating a beautifully-detailed image, and as a mirror image, no less!

Here are a few that I chose. 

Here's the detailed engraving.

This is the title page from another of the books I found. It looks like the printer is the same, but one book has his name as Paulo Mascagni and the other Paulus Mascagnius. Hmmm.

I am fascinated that there are engravings of women and babies in this anatomical book. And these are some pretty healthy looking babies!

Usually, it's just men. Of course, this made me think about the logistics of making the engravings.

In an earlier image in the book, I could discern the word "cadaver" in Latin... The detail in these images is astonishing. 

From the Rare Books

Whew! We finally began shelving the rare books yesterday, literally just un-boxing them onto the shelves. The next step will be cleaning them and arranging them in some sort of order, which is, as yet, undecided. 

A few months ago, we'd purchased six teak bookcases at auction, and I still think that these will be enough to house the 236 books from the collections of John Archer, Upton Scott

and William Osler,

with room left for some of the associated ephemera. 

Here are a few things that I found as we were shelving the books:

The definitive guide to pronouncing Osler's surname. 

John Archer's signature on a 1799 medical journal. 

Upton Scott's signature  on one of his books from 1773.

It was absolutely filthy work, as evidenced by my hands!

Stay tuned for more discoveries!

New Acquisitions on the History of Blacks and Medicine

As I have been going through the 23 cases of books which we recently re-acquired from the Maryland Center for History and Culture, I found some books on the history of Blacks and medicine. Please excuse the poor quality of the photos.

The first one I discovered was "The First Negro Medical Society: The History of the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Washington, D.C." which was active from 1884-1939. It was written by W. Montague Cobb, A.B., M.D., PhD., who was a professor of anatomy at Washington DC's Howard University, and was written in 1939. 

Here is the list of chapters which wend their way through the history of the organization.

The second book is "A Century of Black Surgeons, Vol. II." I haven't come across Vol. I yet, but I am hoping that I do. 

This book was published in 1987, and is a series of stories about people and institutions. Here's a sample:

You will see on this list Mr. Vivien Thomas, who assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins. 

Next up is "Negros for Medicine: A Report of a Macy Conference." It was published in 1968 in Baltimore by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Here is a list of the participants in the conference, which was held in June of 1967.

Finally, there is the book, "Germs Have No Color Line: Blacks and American Medicine, 1900-1940." This was published in 1989 by Vanessa Northington Gamble. This looks to be a series of articles taken from various medical journals over the years. 

If you would like to see any of these books, please email me and we can set up an appointment for you to visit.   

The Saturday Night Club - A Personal Perspective

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I found a cache of letters between "the sage of Baltimore" H.L. Mencken and Max Brödel, the first non-physician member of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. 

Mencken and Brödel founded the "The Saturday Night Club" an informal group of doctors, lawyers, teachers, musicians, artists, writers and businessmen who were interested in friendship, music, conversation and good food and good beer (even during Prohibition). The above photo is probably from Mencken's house, either on Union Square or on Cathedral Street. 

Brödel's daughter, Elsa, who was about 16 in 1927, wrote a personal essay for an assignment for Baltimore's all-girl Bryn Mawr School. It is an incredibly mature and insightful look at at Elsa's parents and their friends. She describes the household getting ready to host the evening at their house on Suffolk Road in Guilford, the arrival of the guests, and finally, her thoughts on each of the guests. 

I scanned the relevant essay and the sketch above, which were published in "Max Brödel: The Man Who Put Art into Medicine," written by Ranice W. Crosby and John Cody and published in 1991 by Springer-Verlag, New York. 

A Cache of Letters from H.L. Mencken to Max Brödel

Honestly, I never know what I will find in the 55 boxes (plus 23 more), and last week, I came across a plain brown envelope with "H.L. Mencken: Photocopies of Letters to Max Brödel" written on it. I wrote about Max Brödel here not only because we have a number of his original works, but because he was the first non-physician member to be honored with a membership to the Faculty. 

One of Brödel's closest friends in Baltimore was H.L. Mencken, known as the Sage of Baltimore. They shared a deep interest in music, Germany (where Brödel was born), and drinking.

Together, they founded the "Saturday Night Club" an informal group of doctors, lawyers, teachers, musicians, artists, writers and businessmen who were interested in friendship, music, conversation and good food and good beer.

The 90 letters we have appear to begin in September of 1912 and continue until 1944, several years after Brödel's death, when the letters were to Mrs. Brödel. 

Some of the letters are quite funny, but as years move on, they become very personal and poignant. Mencken talks about meeting on Saturday nights, making beer, good food, travel, spending summers at Brödel's "camp" in very rural Ontario. He also talks about his and others' sicknesses (he was a noted hypochondriac), deaths among friends and family, the situation in Europe just before WWII, and much more. 

As I read through the letters, some things and some people are easy to figure out, but other references are quite obscure. A link to all of the letters are at the bottom of this post.

The Carl referred to in this letter is one of MB's three children.

It's not unusual to see parts of some of the letters in German.

It is a huge compliment that HLM is asking for one of MB's drawings.

HLM is obviously very pleased with the drawing which he received within three days!

Very curious about the process for re-inoculating beer!

The Cullen in this letter is Dr. Thomas Cullen, a very close friend of MB's who was a part of the Saturday Night Club and also had a camp close to MB's in rural Ontario. Cullen wrote a brief biography of MB.

A gift of yeast from the Lowenbrau breweries was a treaure during Prohibition (1920-1933).

There are numerous mentions in these letters of Dr. Howard Kelly's religion, which he seemed to impose on people. He was one of a group of Canadian physicians at Hopkins, including Osler and Cullen.

All of the letters have been scanned, and where applicable, I have added comments, mostly to explain who Mencken and Brödel were talking about, or to clarify a reference. You can access all of the letters HERE.

1844 German Anatomy Book

As I was perusing a local auction site, I found an 1844 German anatomy book that looked like it would be selling for a song. I put in a bid and basically forgot about it until I got an invoice from the auction house. 

The book wasn't in great condition, sadly, but I thought that it might be good for framed prints. The prints are all engraved and some are hand-colored. 

It turns out I have a small connection with this book, as it came from the extensive collection of Dr. Henry Wilson, a local ophthalmologist and noted bibliophile.

I grew up with his children and spent a lot of time at their house. Dr. Wilson and my father were both book collectors and had numerous conversations about their collections. 

Because the book is written in German, I haven't been able to read through it, but the illustrations speak for themselves. 

We are excited to add another book to our collection!

Another Bookplate

You might remember that we have a significant collection of bookplates here at MedChi. They were originally acquired when we established the Osler Testimonial Fund

and physicians from across the United States requested copies of the OTF bookplate from Marcia. In return, she asked that they send her copies of their plates. You can see a number of posts about them here. 

As I was going through the 55 boxes of ephemera and books which we recently acquired, I found an interesting plate. 

The verse talks about the Kobold and the Cat, and I had never heard of a Kobold before. I headed to the Google and found this: A kobold is a mythical sprite. Having spread into Europe with various spellings including "goblin" and "hobgoblin", and later taking root and stemming from Germanic mythology, the concept survived into modern times in German folklore. 

I am not quite certain how you get goblin from kobold, but nevertheless, it makes the rhyme! I also need to hunt up Frank Baker and see who he is. Here's hoping that there are no kobold in your book collection!

Happy Anniversary, Marcia!

When Dr. William Osler became the President of the Faculty in 1896-1897, the organization was in what they thought was going to be their permanent home on Hamilton Court, off of Eutaw Street. Dr. Osler was a well-known book lover, so the first thing he did was investigate the library, which had been formally founded in 1830. 

Dr. Osler found the library in appalling condition, with out-dated books in no particular order. There had been a librarian on staff, but apparently, she was not up to the task, and was soon gone. 

After consulting his friend, Bernard Steiner who was the head of the Pratt Library, it was suggested that Dr. Osler meet Miss Marcia Crocker Noyes, who worked at the Pratt cataloguing books. Although she didn't know anything about medicine, she had a certain spark, and Dr. Osler thought she'd do just fine. 

And she did just fine, working for the Faculty for 50 years, beginning on November 21, 1896 when she was 27 years old. I had never known the date that she was hired until I found some papers which had the date that she started working at the Faculty. She died on November 24, 1946, almost exactly 50 years after she was hired.

As you may know, we are pretty sure that Marcia is still walking the halls of our building... literally! A few months ago, four of us were working on a Saturday finishing setting up the Museum, and were all in one room. We knew no one else was at the office, but we kept hearing footsteps walking up and down the hall. One or another of us would pop their head out to see who it was, and of course, no one was there!

And then a few days later, as we were working late at night to finalize everything for the Museum opening, all of a sudden, the lightweight plastic dropcloth hanging from the walls suddenly started shimmering and billowing, even though there is no air source in the room and no windows. We looked at each other and gasped, and then burst out laughing, figuring that Marcia had come by to check out what we were doing being at the office so late. 

Congratulations to Marcia for becoming the first full-time staff member at the Faculty 126 years ago today!

Under Construction

As I have been going through the 55 boxes of books and ephemera that we received a few weeks ago, I am discovering all sorts of goodies!

Among those goodies are a series of photographs of the construction of our 1909 building. I had seen a few of these, but there were lots of new ones. They seem to have been taken over the course of the construction, which took a bit more than a year, spanning 1908-1909. And luckily, someone has dated the images, which you can see in the lower right corners.

Interestingly, the names of the architect and builder were on the front of the building.

From the rear of the building, overlooking Maryland Avenue. You can see the former PS 49 to the right of the photo.

Again, from the rear, with a lot more work done a month later.

Same date, and you will notice the complete lack of machinery.

Two weeks later and the structure is going in. 

Oops! Cut off the date on this one, but the brickwork is being installed, as well as some of the marble for the interior.

Late October. The crew testing the loads for the beams.

Early November. It's shocking how small the building looks.

Two weeks later, and the building is really coming into shape.

Brickwork is finished, windows are almost all installed. Two dates on this photo, December 1908 and March 1909. I am inclined to think December.

Looks like it's finally finished, and it will open just a few months later.

Just to make it a little more real, I colorized it a bit. 

It was fascinating to find these images and see how our building was constructed.