THROWBACK THURSDAY IMAGES

Everyone knows the hashtag #TBT, which stands for Throw-Back Thursday. Each Thursday, we post an image on the MedChi Facebook  and Twitter pages. The picture is usually something we've found in the archives, or someone's birthday, or just an image that interests us. Check back every week to see what we've posted!

Liriodendron was the summer home of Dr. Howard Kelly, one of the Big Four at Johns Hopkins. It is located just outside of Bel Air, Maryland. Dr. Kelly lived there with his wife and their nine children. The house stayed in the family until the 1980’s. 

Someone lent us this book about four generations of the Friedenwald family of physicians, many of whom were ophthalmologists. You can read more about it on the MedChi Archives blog.

Almost every time I visit our stacks library, I find something either amazing or amusing. This most definitely falls into the amusing category. One of these things is NOT like the other!

The famed Baltimore Sun editorial cartoonist, Richard “Mocco” Yardley, penned this comical map of the Hopkins Hospital campus in the late 1940’s. A copy of it is now in MedChi’s collection after being acquired at a country auction. 

Although this “throw back” is only 30 years old, most of it will be completely foreign to many people these days!

The College of Pharmacy, now the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, was founded in 1841 and three people were in its first graduating class in 1843. This class of pharmacists is posed at the school’s building on Aisquith Street, which was built in 1873. In 1904, the college merged with the University of Maryland and moved to its Baltimore campus.

Nathan Ryno Smith was affiliated with the University of Maryland School of Medicine for more than 50 years. He was known by his students as “The Emperor.” Smith was widely recognized as the inventor of the anterior splint for fractures of the lower extremities, which was used extensively during the Civil War.

We are celebrating 109 years since the opening and dedication of our building on May 13, 1909. The “Faculty” had moved twice between 1890 and 1909, each time to what they thought was their forever home. But when this building was built, they anticipated the membership numbers would rise, more books would be purchased, and the buildings would be used for meetings and gatherings for decades to come… and that’s exactly what happened. Happy 109^th Birthday to our dear beautiful building.

Surprisingly, we have not had a copy of the seminal title, The Practice of Medicine, by Sir William Osler, MD, in our collections. Although we are sure that there were copies in our collection at one point, we didn’t own one. That has been remedied with the good luck of finding a second edition (1894) copy on eBay. It started its life in Baltimore, being owned by a University of Maryland medical school graduate, then went up to Buffalo, NY where it was owned by a local physician. It was given as a present by a son to his father in the 1950’s and then ended up in a Goodwill in Kentucky. Now it’s back at home and on display in the case on the main stairway. Stop by and say hi to this most famous of medical books!

Every so often, as we’re perusing MedChi’s 100th Anniversary Book, we run across the most amazing names. Recently, when doing some research, we discovered Dr. Jephtha Ellsworth Pitsnogle, late of Hagerstown, Maryland.  He attended the University of Maryland and was First VP of the Washington County Medical Society.

One of the most interesting things about looking at our old papers is the use of various fonts. The two fonts used are fairly elaborate. Sadly, they are not in use today. The invitation was to an Open House for our headquarters on Eutaw Street, also known as Hamilton Terrace. 

In honor of Women’s History Month, we introduce you to Dr. Claribel Cone graduated from the Women’s Medical College in 1890, and then was a professor there for several more years. However, she is more well known as an art collector, and the art works she and her sister, Etta, collected are one of the highlights at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

One of the many bronze plaques scattered around the MedChi buildings. Dr. George H. Rohé (1851-1899). He was president of MedChi in 1893-94, amongst many other accomplishments. The bronze is by Maryland sculptor Ephriam Keyser, a contemporary of Dr. Rohé, and is signed at the bottom.

Dr. Thomas S. Cullen was initially a student of Dr. Howard Kelly at Johns Hopkins. He lived in Mount Vernon for more than 50 years, and after retirement, he chaired the Enoch Pratt Library, the Maryland State Health Commission and the Chesapeake Bay Commission. Read more about him and his biography on the MedChi Archives blog. 

In 1893, MedChi acquired a building at 847 North Eutaw Street (also known as Hamilton Terrace), close to where the former Maryland General Hospital was located. They planned to be there for many years, but realized within ten years that it was too small, and that the library was quickly running out of space. In the first decade of 1900, the Faculty raised the money for our current building which was opened in 1909.