Thursday, July 2, 2026

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? 

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