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.