Joseph Albert Chatard

Joseph Albert Chatard was born in Baltimore on December 10, 1879, the son, grandson and great-grandson of physicians. He was educated at Loyola High School and Loyola College. He attended Johns Hopkins University and then Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as well as Oxford University.

He served his internship at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and entered private practice in 1905. For many years, he was an instructor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the maxim he frequently impressed upon medical students was, “The patient always comes first.”

Dr. Chatard managed many civic duties in addition to his medical practice and served on the boards of Bon Secours Hospital, the O’Neil Hospital Fund and the State Board of Mental Hygiene.

For more than 51 years, he was associated, like his ancestors, with the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty, and served as the Secretary, and then as its President in 1931. In 1955, he was presented with a silver plate on the occasion of his 50-year long membership.

Among his duties, he was a trustee of the fund that supported Marcia Noyes in her final years. Upon her retirement in 1946, he said, “Miss Noyes created a created a reality of the hopes and dreams Dr. Osler formulated while he was at Hopkins… On this foundation, she worked constantly, before and after he left Baltimore, as his understudy to create an atmosphere both effective and genial, so that people would like to come to the building… and would feel that interesting and important things were going on under its roof.

Dr. Chatard was a student of Sir William Osler at Johns Hopkins and again at Oxford in England after Osler became the Regius Professor of Medicine there.

Dr. Chatard died on January 27, 1956, just days before a dinner he had scheduled for fellow physicians at his house.