Alan M. Chesney

Alan Mason Chesney spent a lifetime at Johns Hopkins – as a student, a faculty member, a dean and finally as a historian.

Chesney was born on January 17, 1888 on Asquith Street, just a few blocks from where the hospital would open several months later. He graduated from City College (a high school in Baltimore) in 1905 and then attended Johns Hopkins University, where be played football and lacrosse and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, as well as an AB degree.

In 1912, Dr. Chesney was awarded his doctorate in medicine, after which he became a resident house physician at Hopkins Hospital, and then an assistant in medicine, and an assistant resident physician.

In 1914, he moved to the Rockefeller Institute Hospital in New York as an assistant resident physician until 1917  when he joined the US Army Medical Corps. He served in France and Germany and was discharged in 1919 with the rank of Major. He spent the following two years at Washington University in St. Louis where he was an associate in medicine. When he returned to Hopkins in 1921, he retained the same position.

Dr.  Chesney became the assistant to Dr. Lewis Weed, the dean of the medical school, who was his former medical school classmate. When Dr. Weed returned to the anatomy labs in 1929, Dr. Chesney became the dean, a position he held for 24 years. He guided the Medical School through a difficult period brought on first by the Depression and then by WWII.

With the end of WWII, Dr. Chesney began to reshape medical education with the help of massive amounts of federal funding which had become available as research grants.

Dr. Chesney set high standards for the appointments he made for the department heads, all of which helped advance the hospital’s reputation. After retiring from Hopkins at age 65, Dr. Chesney was named medical consultant to Provident Hospital, and became the hospital’s cheerleader defining it important function to the community.  He also served as a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Baltimore City Hospitals.

In 1952, Dr. Chesney was elected as President of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. He also served as President of the Baltimore City Medical Society. After his mandatory retirement in 1953, he worked at his office in the Welch Medical Library where he was writing the monumental history, “The Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.” He had completed the first three volumes, which ended in 1915, and was writing the fourth, which he did not anticipate completing.

Alan Mason Chesney died on September 22, 1964. In 1979, the Alan M. Chesney Medical Archives was founded as the guardian of all things historical for the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health.