Friedenwald's Medicinal Liquor Establishment: The Ladies' Wine & Liquor Store

There is just so much to unpack with this advertisement from the Baltimore Sun, circa 1904. 

The Friedenwald family arrived in Baltimore in the 1860's and many of them were physicians. At one point, there were five brothers/cousins who were physicians. They were all very involved with MedChi, including Aaron, Edgar and Harry, whose portraits we own, and again Harry, who was President. 

There were also pharmacists in the family, and they owned a pharmacy on Park Avenue in Bolton Hill. Some members of the family lived on Eutaw Place, just a few blocks away.

Back to the liquor ad! It is interesting that there's a liquor store just for the ladies. In some of their other ads, they mention that they have "lady clerks" at their stores to help their "lady patrons."  And their gin is for all of your female complaints! It is also funny that their out of town packages are packed in plain cases. I guess that is the brown paper paper packages, tied up with string.

I also stumbled across a half-page ad from the Baltimore Sun, just before Christmas of 1909. 

There is a whole lot going on in this ad, which is really about 20+ ads in one! Here are some of the details from this, and another ad:

They used the word "jayaitcheff" in a number of their ads, and if you sound it out, it's J H F for J.H. Friedenwald.

This is quite the contraption, and I wonder if they ever received the patent for it.

Friedenwald's seems to be a full service store, with their own rye whiskey and their own cough drops.

And if you want to have a really fun picnic, then just fill your basket with booze. And these are quart bottles, not miniatures.

It's such fun to look at the old advertisements and see what was on offer, and how little it cost! When I went to check the address, there was still a liquor store in the location,

although it looks quite a bit more down-market than Friedenwald's.

P.S. This isn't an April Fool's joke. The store actually existed.

Early Women Physicians: Claribel Cone

 Claribel Cone was born on November 14, 1864, to German immigrants Herman and Helen (Guggenheimer) Cone (Kahn), the fifth of thirteen children. Her father had immigrated to Richmond, Virginia, in 1846 and worked as a dry-goods peddler. Within ten years he settled in Jonesboro, Tennessee, became a co-owner of a grocery store, married, and began a family.

In 1871, they moved to Baltimore, where Herman opened a wholesale grocery business and purchased an elegant, spacious home on Eutaw Place in 1880, becoming part of Baltimore’s flourishing German Jewish community. On Herman Cone’s retirement, his two oldest sons and business partners sold the grocery firm and went into the textile business, moving to Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 1890s and eventually building their own mills. Cone Mills prospered, becoming the world’s leading producer of denim by the 1920s.

Young Claribel Cone loved to read and write, studied botany and German, and enjoyed playing the piano and painting watercolors. She graduated from the Baltimore Western Female High School in 1883. Though her parents encouraged marriage, Cone decided to study at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore to become a physician. First in her class, she graduated in 1890 and undertook postgraduate study at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She won one of five internships at the Philadelphia Blockley Hospital for the Insane.

On returning to Baltimore in 1893, Claribel Cone announced that she preferred medical research and teaching to clinical practice. She secured a position as a lecturer in hygiene at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore. Appointed full professor in 1895, she taught pathology at the college until it closed in 1910.

Between 1903 and 1913, Claribel Cone traveled to Europe nearly every summer and spent several winters at the Senckenberg Pathological Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focused on tuberculosis and the behavior of fatty tissue under normal and pathological conditions. She worked in laboratories under several distinguished pathologists and published at least two articles but did not seem to consider herself a fully established professional in her field and was grateful when mentors praised her work. “It is one of the most flattering and charming things that has ever happened to me in my life—to be approved of as woman and as worker by [Dr. E. Albrecht], one of the most talented yet critical and learned men in the world,” she wrote to her sister Etta in 1910.

Claribel Cone’s competing passion was collecting “beautiful things,” which she said in 1928 that she had enjoyed “ever since I was a small girl and picked up all the shells I could find, reveling in their color and in their forms.” 

In Paris in 1903, Leo and Gertrude Stein introduced their Baltimore friends Claribel and Etta Cone to struggling artists Picasso and Matisse, encouraging the sisters to “indulge in romantic charity” and buy some of the artists’ work. Drawing on their inherited yearly incomes of $2,400 ($64,500 today), the Cone sisters gradually purchased works by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Gaugin, Van Gogh, and others, selecting pieces to adorn the walls of their adjoining Baltimore apartments. 

After World War I, high profits at Cone Mills enabled the sisters to buy more expensive oil paintings. At Etta’s death in 1949, their extensive and world-famous art collection featured over two hundred works by their favorite, Henri Matisse, spanning fifty-two years.

Cone continued to work and study with medical colleagues while living in Munich from 1914 to 1921. Despite her delight in intellectual and social companionship, Cone always lived alone after she left the family home. Her Munich letters report nearly daily social engagements and frequent trips to the opera, concerts, and plays, though she commented in 1920, “On the whole I find things so much more satisfactory than people—people are interesting but you cannot live with them as satisfactorily as with things—things are soothing—if they are works of art—most people are overstimulating.”

Though described by a nephew as a “freethinker,” Claribel Cone was quite conscious of her identity as a Jew. She often commented on colleagues’ ethnic identities and labeled herself a Jewess. Her family belonged to a local Reform temple, observed some religious holidays, and maintained strong ties with other German Jews, but, like many immigrant families, they emphasized Americanization, insisting that their children speak and write in English. Because she lived abroad much of her adult life, Cone’s emotional and social connections to her community of origin are somewhat unclear, though her family generously supported Jewish institutions in Baltimore.

Claribel Cone’s legacy, as she saw it, was her art and artifact collection. Aware of her declining health, she decided to leave her collection to Etta, her most trusted relative and friend. She expressed hope that, “if the spirit of appreciation of modern art in Baltimore should improve,” Etta would will both collections to the Baltimore Museum of Art. She did so.

Claribel Cone died in Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 20, 1929. Dr. Claribel Cone was well known as a charming, dignified, well-informed, self-assured, idiosyncratic, and highly independent woman with two passions, medical research and collecting art and artifacts.

Jewish Women’s Archive

The Baltimore General Dispensary

Our friend, Johns Hopkins (the person, not the institution) has been creating a five-minute educational and entertaining video series about Baltimore over the past year for Baltimore Heritage. The videos have covered subjects as diverse as Formstone, Lumbee Indian Heritage and the Ministry of Brewing. 

Baltimore Heritage just posted a video near and dear to our hearts here at MedChi. It's all about the dispensary movement, prevalent in the 1800's and into the early 1900's. In reviewing the biographies of our members during that period, many of them did a stint at the dispensaries in Baltimore. 

Dispensaries were mainly out-patient clinics for the poor. A wide range of people, including pregnant women, children, incurables and those with contagious diseases, were often excluded from inpatient hospital services, so this was the reason for the dispensary movement. 

There were at least 34 dispensaries in the city, including the First and Second; the North, West, East and South Dispensaries; Nervous Diseases; Eyes, Ears, Noses and Throats; Women and Children; Hebrews and Protestants; and even a homeopathic dispensary. 

One of the most interestingly-named is the Dispensary for Plaster of Paris Jackets and Free School. This dispensary was primarily for children suffering from curvature of the spine. The plaster jacket was changed frequently to help with the straightening.

I hope that you will take a few minutes to watch Johns explain about the dispensary movement in Baltimore. 

Early Maryland Women Physicians: Amanda Norris, MD

As a lifelong resident of Maryland, Amanda Taylor Norris paved the way for women interested in the field of medicine by becoming the first woman physician in Maryland who had received a medical degree from a "regular" college before she attended medical school. 

Along with her brothers and sisters, Amanda received her early education at home from a tutor. Earlier, her parents had sent her to reside with family members to give her an opportunity to attend a nearby school. This arrangement did not last as she was terribly homesick and returned home to her parents and siblings. At the age of seventeen she attended a girl's seminary in Carroll County for one year where her studies included grammar, arithmetic, history, composition, sciences, and German.

Amanda's lifestyle was leisurely and pleasant as expected for a well-to-do family at that time. In the spring of 1875 she attended the graduation of her brother, William, from a medical school in Baltimore. Upon her return trip home she read an article on the Woman's Medical College located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of a handful of medical schools for women. She was excited about the possibility of attending medical school, in part because of the moving commencement she had just attended for her brother. Once home she approached her father; who, although willing to provide the opportunity did not in fact believe Amanda would complete the schooling.

She graduated in 1880 from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania and returned to Baltimore where she began her career in private practice. Sadly, her father died in 1879, unable to see his daughter accomplish her goal.

The Maryland Medical College, a small co-educational school offered her a faculty position as a demonstrator of anatomy, which she readily accepted. The school was later closed due to the opening of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In January 1882, a group of influential Baltimore women organized in the hope of establishing a women's medical school in Baltimore. It took only a short time before a group of Baltimore physicians had become convinced of the need for such a school and lent their support. Amazingly by the fall of 1882, the Women's Medical College of Baltimore opened its doors to its first class of female students.

For two years Dr. Norris served on the faculty of the school as an assistant in the Throat and Chest Clinic, at which point she became a lecturer on the pharmaceutical aspects of medicine. She was appointed to a full professorship in that field in 1886 and was later appointed Professor of Practical Obstetrics.

As Dr. Norris' patient responsibilities increased it became more difficult for her to continue with her teaching, and so after eighteen years of practicing and teaching in Baltimore, she moved her office to Baltimore County to devote all of her time to her practice.

She became a member of the Medical Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1882, and in 1914 became a member of the Women's Medical Society, which was created in response to the increased numbers of women practicing medicine.

In 1929 the Women's Medical Society honored her nearly 50 years of service to her profession. One of the speakers at this ceremony, Dr. William Welch of Johns Hopkins, remarked that it was not necessary to make note of the fact that Dr. Norris was a woman, but more importantly that recognition be given to her accomplishments as a physician and professor; which alone had earned her the respect and admiration of her colleagues.

Dr. Norris married her cousin, a Harford County businessman, early in life and had one child. In 1939 she suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed and died in 1944 at 95 years of age.

Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame

World Book Day

Today is World Book Day. World Book Day changes lives through a love of books and shared reading. Their mission is to promote reading for pleasure, which is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success – more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.  

MedChi has an extensive collection of books, mostly medical journals from the 20th century, from each state, national and specialty medical society. Fortunately, most of these have now been digitized, many through Archive.org, who digitized our pre-1900 medical journals. 

In addition to the journals, we have hundreds of books, some medical, some botanical and some anatomical. Many of these date from the 1700's and 1800's and are fascinating to look through. 

As I was poking though the stacks recently, I took some pictures of some books which caught my eye.

This book, A Treatise on Madness, came with a pressed four-leaf clover. Very poignant.

Someone, who presumably didn't know any better, cut out the inner pages of this book from the 1600's to make a secret hiding place.

This book, dated 1787, is an illustrated guide to skin problems. 

I love how you can see, and feel, the imprint from the type-pieces on the reverse side of the page. 

This is an illustrated 1789 botanical guide.

See if you can take a half-hour or so and read just for fun today, and try to read from an actual book. Happy World Book Day!

Whitfield Winsey, MD

In 1882, Dr. Whitfield Winsey became the first Black member of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland.  

Whitfield Winsey was born to William H. and Malvina Gibbs Winsey of Baltimore. The Winseys were a free Black family, and William Winsey earned enough money as a brickmaker to provide a private education for his son, Whitfield. 

Whitfield’s mother, Malvina, died at the age of thirty-four. Whitfield's father soon re-married and the new couple appear in the 1860 census with Winsey’s brother Oliver, but Winsey himself was not listed that year. Several sources stated he was privately educated, meaning he could have been away at a boarding school when the census was taken. In 1866, William Winsey, his father, passed away, leaving Whitfield his considerable estate. 

In 1867, Winsey began to work with and be tutored in medicine by Dr. John Richard Woodcock Dunbar. In 1871, Winsey graduated from Harvard Medical School, where he was taught by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the essayist, poet and professor of anatomy, and the father of the Supreme Court Justice of the same name. 

In 1872, Winsey returned to East Baltimore and establish his medical practice in his home at 1220 E. Fayette Street. On November 2, 1872, Winsey married Anastasia Jakes. They had three children – William, born in 1872 (died in 1879); Herbert, born in 1875; and Bertha, born in 1878. 

Winsey’s wife Anastasia died in 1884 at age 34, the same age as his mother when she died. 

On April 13, 1882, Whitfield Winsey became the first Black physician admitted to the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. Four members resigned in protest. Earlier in the month, he had been denied membership to the Baltimore Medical & Surgical Society. From the Baltimore Sun: 

During the 1870s and ‘80s, Winsey’s name appeared in the pension files of several Black Civil War veterans as their physician. This was the beginning of a prosperous career serving Blacks professionally, both as a business and a social service, as can be seen in his later medical associations. 

In 1894, a group of prominent Black physicians, including Dr. Winsey, founded Provident Hospital on Orchard Street. This was the first private teaching hospital for Blacks in Baltimore. 

In 1897, there was a movement by the Republican party to have one Black man from each legislative district run for the Maryland State House of Delegates. Dr. Winsey ran in the First District, his home district. There is no further record of what happened in this disputed election, so the presumption was that he was not elected. 

In 1899, Winsey applied for and was granted a permit from the Board of Medical Examiners of the State of Maryland. The reason for this is not clear, as he had been practicing medicine for 20+ years. 

In 1901, Winsey became the treasurer and physician for the Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Melvale, a post which he held until his death eighteen years later.  

In 1902, Provident Hospital moved into two remodeled residences on Biddle Street and Winsey continued as an instructor teaching Black internists.

The theft of horses and carriages, which were regularly left unattended while the owner did some quick business, was relatively common. According to the Baltimore Sun, Dr. Winsey’s horses and carriage were stolen twice while he was attending to patients in their homes. 

According to his biography in the Medical Annals of Maryland, Dr. Winsey was a Delegate to the International Medical Congress at Washington. In addition, Winsey was the author of several papers he presented before the Faculty, the Clinical Society of Maryland, and the Medical Congress. 

Dr. Winsey published an in-depth piece entitled “Some Thoughts on Phthisis Pulmonalis,” (now known as tuberculosis) in the 1886-87 Transactions of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. The article compared incidents of the disease between the white and Black population of Baltimore. Winsey also became a member of the American Medical Association. 

Although Winsey was employed as a physician at Black institutions such as the Melvale Home and Provident Hospital, he belonged to white fraternal and professional organizations, including the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty and the Masons. 

Dr. Winsey provided leadership for many aspects of nineteenth century Black society in Baltimore. As a member of the small but growing cadre of Black physicians in the city, the Harvard-trained Winsey served as the Black voice on the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, which he had joined in 1882. 

Whitfield Winsey died on July 6, 1919, two months short of his 72nd birthday. Dr. William T. Carr, Jr., one of the founders of Provident Hospital, was the medical attendant who signed Winsey's death certificate. 

The Afro-American printed a front-page story on his death, complete with photograph of him under the headline “Baltimore's Oldest Colored Doctor Dies After Long Illness.” The article describes his funeral as follows: “The body was reviewed at the house on Tuesday and hundreds of friends paid their last tribute to an old Baltimorean. 

Funeral services were held from St. Katherine’s of Alexandria Church, Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m.

In his will, Winsey left $500 to his long-time housekeeper, Levinia Cooper, his gold watch and chain to his son Herbert, and the rest of his estate, valued at nearly $24,500, to his daughter Bertha. 

Dr. Winsey is buried at the Laurel Cemetery. This former cemetery was originally created in 1852 and previously located on Belair Road in East Baltimore. It is estimated that nearly 10,000 persons of African-American descent were buried on the five-acre site. 

It was relocated to its present three-acre site in Johnsville, Maryland about 20 miles west of Baltimore, in 1958 after an attempt to bulldoze the graves was halted by the Baltimore NAACP. About 400 grave markers remain. 

Sources: 

• The Road To Thurgood Marshall; The Maryland State Archives 
• The Baltimore Sun, 1865-1920 
• Annals of Medicine in Maryland 1799-1899
• Medical & Chirurgical Faculty Transactions, 1886-87

The Sappington Ledger

As I mentioned in my last post, I was looking to bid on some ephemera from Dr. Francis Brown Sappington, one of the Founders of MedChi in 1799.

We were lucky enough to win the one lot we were most interested in: a ledger dating from 1797 to 1803, the period during which the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty was being founded. 

I picked up the ledger from the auction house and was fascinated to page through it. Although the script is sometimes difficult to decipher, I am managing to read bits and pieces of it.

Dr. Sappington spent most of his life in and around Libertytown, Maryland. Records indicate that he was born in Annapolis in 1754, and he married Anne Ridgeley in 1783. He was active in the Revolutionary War and later moved to Libertytown. 

The ledger is a record of Dr. Sappington's patients, one patient per page, with the date of treatment, a list of maladies, and the cost of the treatment in pounds, shillings and pence!

There are bits and pieces interleaved in the pages of the ledger, including lists of sums, notes and more.

One page even has some small feathers where it looks like a bird crashed into the open book. 

There is also a child's letter to "dear, dear Santa" dating from Frederick in 1896. 

I found a few IOU notes within the pages, and it's amazing to me that they are still there. 

The portrait at the top of this post was also in the auction. It was part of a major art exhibition on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty. 

The portrait is by the artist Frederick Kemmelmeyer, a German-born painter who moved to the US before the Revolutionary War. This painting was also being auctioned and sold for $6,000. Another of Kemmelmeyer's paintings, owned by the Sappington Family, sold for $47,500. Another of his paintings sold at Christie's for $362,500!