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Who is This?

Astonishingly, even after 13 years at MedChi, I am still finding new things! I was walking around with our IT guy trying to find the outlets in each and every room, when I found this!

Although the piece is signed by the sculptor, there is no indication of who it is.

However, the sculptor is Percy Bryant Baker. This is what the Smithsonian has to say about him:

Bryant Baker studied in London at the City and Guild Technical Institute and the Royal Academy of Arts. His decorative carvings and sculpture were installed at Westminster Abbey and other cathedrals. In 1916 he moved to the United States and served in the army, working to rehabilitate American veterans from World War I by modeling artificial limbs. Baker won commissions for busts of five presidents, including John F. Kennedy. He also made bronze and marble statues of other political figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Henry Cabot Lodge. He was a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and a life member of St. George's Society.

The date on the bust is 1919, so I checked newspapers.com to see if I could find anything about him being in Baltimore around that time, and Baker was here sculpting a bust of Major (Dr.) R. Tunstall Taylor, US Army.

Hmmm... the name was familiar, but I couldn't think why, so I looked him up in our Annals, and found this. 

Founded in 1895 by Dr. R. Tunstall Taylor, the Hospital for Crippled and Deformed Children was originally located at 6 West 20th Street. It was a free orthopaedic hospital for "crippled and deformed children." Two years later another house joined the hospital to form a complex, which eventually became Kernan Hospital. When I give my Historic Hospitals lecture, I talk about him and his small hospital.

This is the image of the bust in the Baltimore Sun. 

Unfortunately, the picture is not very clear, but comparing the profiles, they are similar. 

When you look closely, you can see the insignia of the US Army Medical Corps.

Major Taylor was assigned to the office of the Surgeon-General at the War Department, where Baker was working on making plaster cases for exhibits of war victims for the Army Medical Department's Medical Museum.  

So, have I solved the mystery? Or do you think that this is someone else? 

Philadelphia Hospital Museum

A few weeks ago, I took a quick trip to see the newly-opened Philadelphia Hospital Museum. We are getting ready to update our Medical Museum here at MedChi, so the opening was fortuitous, as we might be able to get some ideas from what they have done.

The Penn Hospital Museum is located on the campus of Penn Hospital in the oldest section of the city and is the oldest chartered hospital in the USA. 

In this period engraving, you can see the central sections which now holds the museum. On the top floor, the operating theatre uses the light from the sun to illuminate the room. 

The hospital grounds are surrounded by a beautiful garden and a central statue of William Penn, who was a founder of the hospital and later for some of its funding.

Each floor of the Museum has different rooms and exhibits. As you enter, you see the beautiful Minton-tiled floors and the elegant staircase. 

There is also a huge (8'x5.5') painting of Samuel Coates by the painter, Thomas Sully. 

There was also an old exhibition space, along with a botanical room. 

Fortunately, there is much of the original detailing remaining in the building, including secret staircases!

Like MedChi, this Museum has old ledgers and lists, which are fascinating to read. 

Of course, one of my favorite rooms was the beautiful old libraries, filled with glass-fronted bookcases.

They had some of the old anatomical and botanical books printed on heavy plastic (or something) so you could see the actual pages without touching them. 

On the top floor was the operating theatre. The guide told us that they could only operate between eleven and two or three on sunny days because of the light. 

Like us, PHM had lots of old surgical instruments and other tools. 

As I mentioned, the grounds are really lovely, especially on a hot, late June afternoon. 

We were so pleased to have the opportunity to visit and it was really worth the 200+ mile round trip! 

The Books That (Maybe) Hold Up the Building

Our friend, Tyler Cymet, DO, FACP, FACOFP, FFSMB, former MedChi President and current Chair of Medicine and Primary Care and Professor of Medicine at the Illinois College of Osteopathic Medicine at The Chicago School, has written a fascinating article about our stacks

The Books That (Maybe) Hold Up the Building

There is a piece of Baltimore medical lore so exquisitely calibrated to its audience that it feels almost unfair. It involves William Osler. It involves a stately early 20th‑century building. And it suggests—calmly, almost offhandedly—that the books inside may help hold the building up.

The setting is MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society, whose Cathedral Street headquarters opened in 1909 under Osler’s influence. He left just before it opened, but he was integral to the planning and design.

The story, often told in low, reverent tones, is that the book stacks were designed not merely to store knowledge, but to function as part of the building’s structure itself.

Not symbolically. Literally.

It is exactly the sort of thing physicians want to believe: that our professional ancestors took knowledge so seriously they made it load‑bearing.

And the remarkable thing is that, while the story cannot be proven in its most dramatic form, it sits squarely on top of a very real and very clever architectural truth.

Osler, the bibliophile who built institutions

To understand why this story feels so right, it helps to remember that Osler was not just a clinician and educator. He was, in the most literal sense, a builder of libraries.

Throughout his career, he treated libraries not as background infrastructure but as essential instruments of medicine. He actively expanded collections in Philadelphia, contributed volumes wherever he went, and took a direct role in shaping institutional libraries at Johns Hopkins and within the Maryland medical community. 

He went further than advocacy. He helped found professional organizations devoted to medical libraries, including what became the Medical Library Association, embedding the idea that a modern medical profession required a modern library system.  (No disrespect to Marcia Noyes Crocket, his partner who was also critical to the formation of libraries).

And, in a final flourish that feels almost architectural in spirit, he left behind a personal collection so significant that it became the Osler Library at McGill—still one of the world’s great centers for the history of medicine. 

For Osler, books were not décor. They were infrastructure. They were how medicine thought.

So when he helped shape a building for MedChi, it is not a stretch to imagine that the library was not merely included, but prioritized, organized, and perhaps even physically emphasized in ways that went beyond the ordinary.

When buildings were designed for the weight of knowledge

At precisely the moment MedChi was constructed, architects faced a practical problem that feels almost philosophical: books weigh a lot.

Not metaphorically. Physically. They are heavy.

In response, a generation of engineers and architects developed what might be one of the most quietly radical building systems ever devised: self-supporting metal book stacks. These were multi-level steel frameworks so regular and so strong that they could carry not only the books, but also:

• the floors between tiers,
• the loads of the spaces above,
• and sometimes even portions of the building’s overall weight.

In some cases, the logic of the building was inverted. Instead of floors supporting shelves, the shelves supported the floors, with loads traveling through the stack system down to the foundation. 

This was not obscure experimentation. It appeared in some of the most important libraries of the era, including the Library of Congress, Harvard’s Widener system, and the great stack cores of New York’s research libraries. 

The effect, if you paused to consider it, was extraordinary. These were buildings in which structure and knowledge storage were one and the same.

You were not walking through rooms filled with books.

You were walking through the building’s skeleton—and it just happened to be filled with books.

Chicago, Baltimore, and the library as machine

This architectural moment was not confined to a single city. It spread across the United States just as libraries were expanding rapidly under philanthropic and civic investment.

Chicago is a particularly resonant example. In the late 19th century, the city became a laboratory for new forms of construction—steel framing, elevators, and the early skyscraper. The Newberry Library, completed in 1893, sits squarely in that environment: a monumental research institution designed during the same era that produced structural innovations across the city. 

While the Newberry’s current stacks are housed in a separate modern facility, it emerged from a moment when libraries were being reconceived as systems of storage, access, and structural logic, not merely reading rooms.

Behind many of these projects was a quiet industrial force: companies like Snead & Co., which manufactured modular iron stack systems deployed in libraries across the country and around the world. Their designs emphasized fireproofing, density, and the ability to expand vertically—traits that made them not just furniture, but proto-structural frameworks embedded in buildings from Washington to university campuses and beyond. 

Baltimore, rebuilding and expanding rapidly after the 1904 fire, was part of this same architectural ecosystem. The MedChi building belongs to this moment—a time when civic ambition, medical professionalism, and industrial materials converged in buildings that were, at their core, machines for organizing knowledge.

So, what is probably true about MedChi?

Here is the responsible version—the one that preserves the interesting part without overpromising.

There is no widely cited, definitive structural documentation demonstrating that the MedChi stacks alone carry the building in the dramatic way the story suggests.

But given the timing, the typology, and Osler’s influence, it is highly plausible that:

• the building incorporated an advanced, integrated stack system,
• the stacks may have carried significant localized loads,
• and the architecture was intentionally organized around the needs of the library itself.

Which means the popular phrasing—“the books hold up the building”—is likely an embellishment.

But it is an embellishment resting on a very solid foundation.

Which, again, feels appropriate.

If Osler were building MedChi today

This is where the story becomes unintentionally funny.

If we were to reconstruct Osler’s instincts in 2026, we would not get a cathedral of iron stacks. We would get something sleeker, more open, and far less romantic. 

The physical library would shrink. The collaborative space would expand. The phrase “knowledge ecosystem” would appear somewhere in the planning documents.

And structurally? The building would not rely on books.

It would rely on things like:

• server rooms,
• redundant power supplies,
• cooling systems designed with the intensity of an ICU,
• and a Wi‑Fi network whose failure would trigger more panic than a missing monograph ever did.

If the 1909 building flirted with the idea that knowledge could be physically load-bearing, the modern building quietly assumes that knowledge is weightless—but critically dependent on electricity. Plugs, the outlets of electricity, are an accreditation requirement. 

One can imagine Osler touring such a space, peering at a server rack, and being told, “This is where the knowledge lives now.”

He would likely be polite.

He might not be convinced.

The enduring appeal of a structurally meaningful idea

The MedChi story persists because it says something physicians still want to believe.

That knowledge is not just useful. It is not just cumulative. It is not just archived.

It is foundational.

The idea that bookshelves might hold up a building resonates not because it is strictly true, but because it feels correct in a deeper way. It reflects a moment when medicine organized itself—intellectually and physically—around the disciplined collection of knowledge.

And if, in that moment, an architect or engineer found a way to let the shelves do a little structural work as well, it only strengthens the point.

Final diagnosis

So where does this leave us?

The claim that MedChi’s stacks support the building is not definitively proven. But it is consistent with real architectural practices of the time, practices in which shelving systems could and did serve structural roles.

In medical terms, it is best understood as: well-supported lore, with excellent historical plausibility and just enough ambiguity to remain interesting.

Which may be the most Oslerian outcome of all.

Because even if the books are not literally holding up the building, they are still doing something more subtle and perhaps more enduring: They are holding up the idea that medicine is built—carefully, deliberately, and sometimes beautifully—on the things we choose to know.

 

Napoleon and MedChi

As you may know, MedChi has the (alleged) medical case from Napoleon Bonaparte's physician from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. You can watch our brief video about it here.

We are updating the MedChi Museum of Maryland Medical History a bit and will be moving the Napoleon case to another wall. It currently has an old Piranesi print hanging above it, but that's from the wrong era.

Like Marcia, I am an inveterate auction-goer, and at a recent auction, I found an old 1880s cigarette card collection called "The Napoleon Album" published by the tobacco firm, Allen & Ginter from Richmond, Virginia. 

The booklet (not cigarette cards) contains a number of beautifully lithographed images of Napoleon's life, bound with a length of silk cording.

Although my copy is not in great condition, it is more than 140 years old, I did find high resolution copies of the book from Duke University's library. 

My plan is to frame the originals and hang them above the Napoleon Cabinet. 

   

The Two Mary Garretts and Medicine

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture on the two Mary Garretts. One was Mary Garrett by birth and one by marriage. They were polar opposites in many ways, but the intersected through medicine. Here's the story, complete with my slides to illustrate:

Once upon a time in Baltimore, lived two women named Mary Garrett. One was named that by birth and the other by marriage. Both had more money than they could ever spend, and for both of them, that money came from the founding family of the B&O Railroad, the Garretts. Both are credited with being philanthropic, but in two different ways.

Baltimore, and Maryland are littered with buildings, streets, and locations named after the family, think Garrett County in Western Maryland.

But first, let’s look at the back story!

John Work Garrett was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 31 July 1820. At the age of 16, he became an associate in his father's business, Robert Garrett & Sons, and at 19 he became a clerk in the firm. In 1855, he was elected to the Board of Directors for the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad. Three years later, on November 17, 1858, he was elected President of the B&O Railroad - a position he held for 26 years.

John Garrett and the B&O Railroad played a key role in helping to preserve the Union during the Civil War. The nation's first railroad assumed the important role of transporting soldiers, equipment, supplies, and wounded. The Civil War was the first war in which railroads were used extensively. At the outbreak of the war, the B&O became the nation's most important railroad because it linked Washington, D.C., to the rest of the Union, and allowed soldiers to move quickly into Virginia, as well as Confederate territory to the west.

Although Garrett sympathized with the southern cause, his business allegiance was to the Union. While neither a soldier nor a politician, his counsel was highly respected and trusted. He was frequently called to Washington, D.C., for advice on transportation affairs. Throughout the war, Garrett could be found either in Baltimore (Camden Station where Camden Yards is now located) where he received reports and issued orders for movement of trains, or along the B&O rail lines trying to maintain the morale of his men.

John Work Garrett married Rachel Ann Harrisson (1823–1883), and the couple had four children, Robert, Henry, John, and Mary, who was the youngest and only girl.

Garrett began purchasing B&O Railroad stock early, when the railroad was competing with the newly completed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which paralleled the Potomac River from Georgetown to Cumberland and the National Road.

Following a motion by board member Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), the largest stockholder since 1847 as well as chairman of the financial committee, John Garrett became the B&O's new president. Hopkins, a Maryland native, had made his substantial fortune in Baltimore. The Garrett Company as well as the B&O had strong ties to the London-based George Peabody & Company, and through their business interests, financier George Peabody (1795–1869).

At Johns Hopkins' request, Garrett arranged a dinner meeting with Peabody and Hopkins, and the very next day Hopkins announced his intention to establish a hospital and university. While this story is uncorroborated, Peabody likely did influence Hopkins in deciding what to do with his wealth.

John Work Garrett's daughter, Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1854–1915), a civic activist, philanthropist in her own right and suffragist, helped fund the Bryn Mawr School, the Baltimore Museum of Art (1914), and secured the admission of women to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as a condition of her bequest to supplement the endowment of Hopkins' from twenty years before. Thus, the new Hopkins medical college became one of the nation's first co-educational schools in 1893.

Mary’s education was rather peripatetic. She attended the private Miss Kummer’s School in Mount Vernon, beginning at age twelve. While there, she met two girls who would become her lifelong friends: Julia Rebecca Rogers, aka Dolly, and Elizabeth King, aka Bessie. All three girls were from wealthy families, and after Dolly’s father died, she became a ward of John Garrett.

While Mary initially liked school, she soon became bored with the school’s philosophy of “cultivation not college.” Girls were not allowed to study science, so Dolly, Bessie, and Mary formed a study group, and to the shock of everyone, dissected a rat!

Disappointed with the lackluster experiences of school education, Mary quit school at age seventeen and never returned to school. She was self-taught in literary classics, and spoke fluent Italian and French and practiced German and Greek.

John Garrett always said of Mary, that she was his child who had the best business brain, and he wished she had been a boy. But at the time, women didn’t go into business settings, especially one as powerful as the B&O Railroad. However, he did allow her to attend business meetings with him, and she later became his personal secretary and had the opportunity to meet many of the business titans of the time.

Adolescence was not a period of comfort and happiness for Garrett. She felt uncomfortable with the Victorian expectations of women at the time and was also uncomfortable with the attitude towards sex in her family. Every family member avoided sex-related topics on purpose, and she had to teach herself about puberty.

Garrett showed interests in business and managed her personal financial matters by herself during this time period. Given a weekly allowance of five to ten dollars per week, she kept record of all expenses in her notebook. Besides, she kept all the letters from her relatives and friends, including Julia and Elizabeth.

Garrett also kept a diary, which was given to her by the philanthropist and longtime friend of the Garret family, George Peabody, the respectable founder of the Peabody Institute and the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.

After leaving school, she continued to learn from her father about commerce and the operation of a railroad company, later serving as his secretary. John Garrett also taught his daughter by example in his philanthropy. Garrett’s giving was influenced by his friend George Peabody, and he maintained close ties with Johns Hopkins, serving as a trustee of both Hopkins’s university and hospital.

Interestingly, Mary never continued her education, blaming herself for her difficulties in academic achievement which she thought could be linked to medical problems with her uterus. Others attributed her health problems to Garrett’s stifling, conservative world in which her father prohibited her from pursuing marriage, college or a career, as the cause of her mental collapse, or ‘neurasthenia’ in Victorian terms, at the age of 25.

When she inherited nearly $2 million upon her father’s death, Mary Garrett would employ the lessons she gleaned from the example of her father and his friends and become a philanthropist in her own right.

Mary Garrett relied heavily on her intimate circle of friends, known as the “Friday Evening.” The intellectually curious group included M. Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth “Bessie” King, and Julia Rogers—all but one of them daughters of trustees of Johns Hopkins University, the hospital, or both. It was with this group that Garrett collaborated on her two key philanthropic achievements: the Bryn Mawr School and Johns Hopkins Medical School.

The Bryn Mawr School was Garrett’s first philanthropic undertaking. The Friday Evening group was appalled by the lack of a serious college preparatory school for girls in Baltimore. Garrett’s inheritance provided the means to remedy the situation. They decided to act.

They named the new preparatory school for Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, after acquiring the school’s permission to do so. (They also maintained close ties to the college, and Bryn Mawr school students were required to pass the college entrance examination in order to graduate.)

Garrett not only provided the necessary funds to establish and build the school, she also closely oversaw the project. Her hands-on involvement extended to the selection of gym equipment and artwork for the school, which was located but a few blocks from Garrett’s home in Baltimore on Cathedral and Preston Streets. The Friday Evening served as the governing body of the school. Garrett was its president.

Garrett and the Friday Evening Group then set their sights higher—the education of women at Johns Hopkins University. Garrett first attempted to open the doors of Johns Hopkins to women in 1887 by offering the university $35,000 to establish a coeducational school of science. The university president and trustees rejected her offer.

Just a few years later, however, Johns Hopkins found itself on unsure financial footing. The opening of the medical school had been delayed due to insufficient funds. The Friday Evening saw an opportunity.

Garrett enlisted her friends and sought support from other influential women around the country (including Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Leland Stanford, and First Lady Mrs. Benjamin Harrison) to raise funds to approach the university with a new offer. Garrett offered the trustees $100,000 (half of which she contributed personally) to pay for the opening of the medical school on one condition: that men and women would be admitted on equal standing. The board accepted the offer, but then told the group that the school could not open with less than $500,000.

When the university and the newly formed Women’s Medical Fund Committee struggled to approach this number, Garrett stepped in and covered the difference with $307,000. But her additional funding came with additional conditions. These new conditions required that the medical school be a full graduate school leading to a medical degree and that all applicants be required to have a bachelor’s degree in the field of science (neither of these stipulations were normal to medical schools in the country at the time).

Garrett’s funding and her clearly outlined conditions not only opened medical education to America’s women, they also turned Johns Hopkins into the first modern medical school in the United States. In his history of the school, Alan Chesney concludes: “To this lady, more than any other single person, save only Johns Hopkins himself, does the School of Medicine owe its being.”

Throughout the rest of her life, Garrett would continue to use her wealth and influence to promote women’s education and opportunity. She gave generously to Bryn Mawr College and later became a major funder of the cause of women’s suffrage. Her final years were spent at Bryn Mawr with her close friend M. Carey Thomas, who was president of the college, to whom Garrett left her fortune upon her death in 1915.

Thomas and Garrett lived for many years together at the Deanery which Garrett lavishly decorated with works of original art and fine furniture. The Deanery was, as well as a private residence for Thomas and Garrett (and Mamie Gwinn before her), a formal entertainment space used for faculty parties, dinners for visiting speakers and for student teas and other entertainments included both Garrett and Thomas’ names on the printed invite).

For her bargain with the Johns Hopkins medical school, Garrett is sometimes called America’s greatest “coercive philanthropist.” William Osler, one of the school’s four founding physicians, famously replied: “It was a pleasure to be bought.”

While Osler appreciated Mary Elizabeth Garrett for spearheading the Women's Medical School Fund and also for conceiving and funding John Singer Sargent's portrait, The Four Doctors (1905), he was very close to her sister-in-law, Mary Sloan Frick Garrett, later Jacobs. 

Mary apparently did not warm to Osler as much as she did to the other portrait-sitters: the pathologist William Henry Welch, the gynecologist Howard Atwood Kelly, and the surgeon William Stewart Halsted, who was her close personal friend and also one of her physicians. John Singer Sargent also painted a portrait of Mary Elizabeth Garrett which hangs in the William Welch Building at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

After Mary Elizabeth Garrett died, Jacobs joined a lawsuit brought by his wife and other Garrett family members against M. Carey Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Garrett's longtime partner to whom she left most of her estate. They ultimately lost. Whether the Oslers would have been close to Mary Elizabeth Garrett had it not been for the feud among the siblings is, of course, speculative. 

Thomas and Garrett shared much in their ambitions for women in their contemporary society and worked closely on issues such as suffrage and access to higher education. Their letters reveal their shared aims, their intellectual exchanges, joint passions for art, literature, poetry and engagement with prominent scholars of their time, and their very different personalities that somehow seemed to work together in creating partnership, friendship and intimacy that lasted over four decades.

Mary Sloan Frick Garrett Jacobs

Mary Sloan was the daughter of William Frederick Frick, who was born in Baltimore in 1817 to William and Mary Sloan Frick. He was educated at Baltimore City College and graduated from Harvard in 1835, at a very young age. He was admitted to the bar in 1839. He lectured on matters of science and public interest, but was not a physician like his brother, Charles Frick.

Frick took especial interest in the public school system of the day and as President of the School Board contributed a great deal to support educational progress. As a lawyer it has been said of him that he was one whom any colleague might envy, and any adversary might fear. He later became a judge of the Superior Court of Baltimore. He was also a significant supporter of MedChi.

Mary Sloan Frick was born in 1847, was privately educated by governesses and tutors and was not permitted to leave home without the accompaniment of a tutor or family member.

The Fricks employed tutors and a governess to educate Mary and her sister in music, art, literature, and handiwork. Social graces were emphasized: inviting guests to tea was a treasured tradition. Out of affection and respect for her parents, Mary modeled her values on theirs—values that she held her entire life.

In 1872, Mary wed Robert Garrett, the oldest son of John W. Garrett, who was president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Robert Garrett & Sons Bank.

After his father’s death in 1884, Robert was elected president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He endeared himself to the employees (unlike his father, who had exploited them), and did much for his city. But by the mid-1890s the second Robert Garrett was a sick man, apparently from kidney disease. In 1886, his physician advised an extended trip. Garrett went west with a group of friends in private rail cars. Reaching San Francisco, he decided to extend the trip around the world, for which he needed a personal physician.

Enter Henry Barton Jacobs. He received his B.A. in 1883 and his M.D. in 1887, both from Harvard University.  In 1897, after the entourage returned to Baltimore from their world tour, Jacobs chose to stay on and moved in with the Garretts. It was the ultimate concierge practice—a single, ultra-rich patient—but not an easy one, as Garrett by then had mental as well as physical illness.

While abroad on a trip planned to ease his nerves, his tenuous health was further hampered by the unexpected death of his beloved brother, Thomas Harrison, in a yachting accident. Garrett lived eight years in a state of precarious health before dying in 1896. 

After Garrett died in 1896, Jacobs, who had become especially interested in tuberculosis, became more closely associated with the Johns Hopkins Hospital and its medical school. He actively participated in organizations directed toward the treatment and eradication of tuberculosis. In 1911, Jacobs was elected a trustee of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, a position he held until his death.

Jacobs quietly married Mary Frick Garrett in 1902. Together, they cultivated interests in the fine arts and the history of medicine. In 1932, he donated his collection of medical books, medallions, and engravings to the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of the History of Medicine. He also provided funding for a room to house the collection.

A connoisseur of fine art and architecture, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs built a major collection of European painting and sculpture which she housed in a sumptuous mansion on Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore. There she entertained lavishly, becoming the leading arbiter of Baltimore society.

Mary Sloan was known as “the Mrs. Astor of Baltimore's 400,” the ultimate social arbiter. To have her bow to one at the opera, at the races, or at any other social event was to have one's social position acknowledged; to have her show up at a party for even a few minutes declared the evening a success; and to be invited to her home proved that one had “arrived.” She epitomized the excesses of America's Gilded Age.

At this time, both the pro- and anti-vote women were meeting at Osler Hall at the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. The two groups agreed not to bother each other and their meetings. One man was caught in the middle of the two Marys.

Dr. William Osler was very close friends with Mary Garrett Jacobs and Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs. But he was also the Chief of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and had been with the Hospital since it opened. Mrs. Jacobs considered the Oslers one of the few people who were her peers in Baltimore.

Neither Osler nor his wife became close to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, who was the second Robert Garrett's younger sister and therefore Mary Frick Jacobs's sister-in-law. They could not have been more different. Not surprisingly, she clashed frequently with her more socially progressive sister-in-law Mary Elizabeth Garrett and publicly opposed her notable causes. Her sister-in-law did all she could to dissuade her wealthy friends from contributing to the Women's Medical School Fund, and she later served as president of the Baltimore chapter of the Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, thus countering another cause célèbre of Mary Elizabeth Garrett. Despite her strong opposition to coeducation and women’s suffrage, she supported many worthy charitable causes during her lifetime.

But Mary was not without a philanthropic spirit. To honor her first husband, she established the Robert Garrett Hospital for Children on North Carey Street, as well as a training school for nurses attached to the hospital. She provided funding for the children to recuperate in Mount Airy, Maryland, during the summer months and for the cost of the railway fares for mothers to visit their children whenever they wished.

Mary’s home in Baltimore City is now known as the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, home to the Engineers Club, named for the men who re-built Baltimore after the Great Fire of 1904. The home was inspired by those on the Champs del Elysees in Paris, Garrett wanted a similar park in front of his own home. Henri Cremier designed the fountain that graces that space.

Robert and Mary Garrett hired Gilded Age architect Stanford White of architectural firm McKim, Mead and White to help them realize their vision of a beautiful home that would compare with other Gilded Age homes in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The renovations would continue for thirty-two years until the house included over forty rooms, sixteen fireplaces, and one hundred windows.

Given her demands, Stanford White initiated several extraordinarily beautiful details including the spiral staircase, the entrance fireplace with inglenooks, and the hanging Venetian lamp. He also designed the family dining room in Renaissance style, featuring tapestries on the walls, elaborately carved cabinets, painted black to suggest ebony. All of the downstairs rooms opened onto a courtyard of exotic plants, a parrot, and a monkey. 

After Mary’s marriage to Dr. Jacobs, they enlarged the house by purchasing the adjacent townhouse. It was “renovated” by John Russell Pope, who would later design the Baltimore Museum of Art which housed much of Mary’s art collection.

Her Newport home was the lost Whiteholme estate. Completed in 1903, for Mrs Mary Sloan (Frick) Garrett, the widow of Robert Garrett. Having stood at the corner of Narragansett and Ochre Point Avenue, Whiteholme was among Newport's most impressive French Neo-Baroque mansions put up during the Gilded Age.

A third house, Uplands, located west of Baltimore City in what would have been the county, was a forty-two-room Victorian mansion. The property formerly belonged to General John Swan, Mary Jacobs' great-grandfather, as a part of his larger Hunting Ridge estate. Mary Frick and her husband Robert stayed at the house on Mount Vernon Place between November and Easter then returned to Uplands every spring. In 1885, they hired E. Francis Baldwin, architect for the B&O Railroad, to renovate the property. Mary continued to use the property as a resident up until her death in 1936 when she left the building to the Episcopal Church.

The prenuptial contract specified that neither husband nor wife could lay claim to the other's property and that each could dispose of their properties as they saw fit. Despite, or perhaps because of, this stipulation, it was reported in a gossip column that “Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs is the most devoted husband in Newport. He seems unable to do enough for his wife, and waits on her hand and foot.”

Dr. and Mrs. Jacobs travelled extensively for the next few decades, taking ocean liners to Europe, crossing the United States in private train cars, entertaining, collecting art (her) and historic medical books (him), until they began slowing down. 

Mary Sloan Frick Garrett Jacobs died in 1936, and Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs died in 1939. They are buried next to each other in Baltimore's elegant Greenmount Cemetery.

Their house on Mount Vernon Place went through several owners, including a funeral home and the Masons, until a plan was hatched to knock it down and make it a parking lot! Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and it was acquired by the Engineers Club, remnants of the men who had re-built Baltimore after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.