A while ago, I came across a box of paper ephemera, and couldn't resist going through it, sheet by sheet. What struck me was the elegance of many of the bills. They were all engraved with either the logo of the company, or the building in which it was located. Here are a few of my favorites.
The staircase in our 1909 building is one of its signature design elements. It moves up through our building from the basement to the fourth floor where Marcia's apartment was located.
On the fourth floor, the stairs are about six feet wide. As you move down through the building, the stairs get wider and wider, causing a funnel-like effect to bring the light through the building. You can get an idea of the size of the openings by the dark spots on the blueprint below.
There is a skylight at the top of the stairs which we opened several years ago. Read about it here. Opening the skylight made a world of difference to the staircase which had always been very, very dark.
Each set of stairs is actually three sets, intersected with two landings, as you can see in the image above. From the basement to the third floor, the stairs are Calacatta marble in grey and white pattern. The landings are one-inch by one-inch marble tesserae tiles, surrounded by black marble.
Originally, there were windows along the south side of the staircase, which would bring in both air and light. When we connected the two buildings, we used that space to add bathrooms and an elevator. You can see that on the blueprint on the right of the first floor.
Because you could suddenly see the whole aspect of the staircase when the skylight was uncovered, we decided to hang some portraits in the stairwell. You can read about it here.
I recently made a little video about our staircase, which you can watch on YouTube.
I am going to tell you a story about MedChi’s historic seal.
It was a rather dour looking piece, with the figure of Aesculapius with his serpent-entwined staff. It was originally rendered in red and black, with deep-set eyes. He was known as “old potato head.”
In our centennial book, there is a slightly different version of the potato head with more hair and more rays emanating from his head.
After we moved into the new building in 1909 and the library continued to grow, we asked the medical illustrator, Max Brödel to design an updated seal for us. You can see the date on Brödel’s original sketch of the seal.
It wasn’t until the 1930’s that it was finally engraved, and hundreds
of copies were printed to place in our book collections.
Soon, we received a letter from one of our members, letting us know that there was a mistake on the seal. Around the bottom edge of the seal are a few words in the Greek alphabet. One of the letters is incorrect.
And because that letter is wrong, it changes the meaning of the sentence! It should read, “A physician is of more value than many other men for the dressing of wounds and the stilling of pain,” from Homer’s Illiad, Book II, Line 514.
The mistake was combining a Greek Z and a Greek X, when there
is no such letter. It should have been three parallel lines, with the middle
one a little shorter.
The mistake was corrected, and new bookplates were printed.
Today marks the 391st anniversary of the founding of the state of Maryland. The Medical & Chirurgical Faculty is proud to have been a part of Maryland for 225 of those years.
Over the years, I've presented a lecture entitled "Historic Hospitals of Baltimore." It features many of the hospitals that made Baltimore the medical mecca that it is now. However, all of the hospitals that I've featured are from before or just after 1900.
But there is a hospital that's always been along the edge of my radar, and I had a chance to visit it last week. The property has been a hospital since the early 1900s and most recently, it was part of the Sheppard Pratt system. You can read its history in great detail here.
In the 1950s or so, Taylor Manor was purchased by a family who ran a jewelry store in the near-by village of Ellicott City. It was one of only a dozen or so private psychiatric hospitals in the country.
Sadly, all of the original buildings are gone now, but vestiges of the 1966 Mid-Century Modern buildings, which are quite amazing, remain.
The buildings were designed by the modernist, Mark Beck of Potter & Beck, Architects, later Mark Beck Associates.
We have several old advertisements for Taylor Manor in our Maryland Medical Journals which certainly made it look like a swinging place! The illustrations were done by local sketch artist, Aaron Sopher, who frequently provided illustrations for our Medical Journal.
Here are some images I took at Taylor Manor over the weekend. I thought they looked more dramatic in black and white! The family has been wanting to develop the land but the zoning is tricky because of the Ellicott City floods, the fact that the property is at the top of a 400' high hill, and that there would be a lot of impervious surfaces in the development.
