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.
