Taylor Manor Hospital

Over the years, I've presented a lecture entitled "Historic Hospitals of Baltimore." It features many of the hospitals that made Baltimore the medical mecca that it is now. However, all of the hospitals that I've featured are from before or just after 1900. 

But there is a hospital that's always been along the edge of my radar, and I had a chance to visit it last week. The property has been a hospital since the early 1900s and most recently, it was part of the Sheppard Pratt system. You can read its history in great detail here.

In the 1950s or so, Taylor Manor was purchased by a family who ran a jewelry store in the near-by village of Ellicott City. It was one of only a dozen or so private psychiatric hospitals in the country. 

Sadly, all of the original buildings are gone now, but vestiges of the 1966 Mid-Century Modern buildings, which are quite amazing, remain. 

The buildings were designed by the modernist, Mark Beck of Potter & Beck, Architects, later Mark Beck Associates. 

We have several old advertisements for Taylor Manor in our Maryland Medical Journals which certainly made it look like a  swinging place! The illustrations were done by local sketch artist, Aaron Sopher, who frequently provided illustrations for our Medical Journal. 

Among the issues the hospital treated was gambling, but not alcohol. It was one of the first places to prescribe Thorazine, a neuroleptic, in 1953, and started the first psychiatric hospital for children in 1966. 

Here are some images I took at Taylor Manor over the weekend. I thought they looked more dramatic in black and white! The family has been wanting to develop the land but the zoning is tricky because of the Ellicott City floods, the fact that the property is at the top of a 400' high hill, and that there would be a lot of impervious surfaces in the development.

This is an image from when the new part of the hospital opened. 

I love exploring, so take a look at some other hospitals I've visited!

The MedChi Museum & Archives YouTube Page

I've just uploaded some short videos on our YouTube Page: MedChi Museum and Archives. Most of these are less than a minute-and-a-half long, and are also being published on our Instagram page. 

I hope that you will spend three or four minutes watching them. Here is the LINK.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I recently found this inscription in a 1940's miniature English-Castilian dictionary, and thought it would be perfect for Valentines Day.

"To Cuddles, from your ever-lovin' bright eyes. 

Till the end of time. 

Your Red Head Doll xxx" 

A Boom in Historic Medical Book Collecting

Although I have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, I am usually several days late in reading it. So when I got a few texts about an article in the Weekend Edition, I got right to reading it. Without permission, I am re-printing it here (but using illustrations from our collections). 

PS Please see this post about one of our special books!

The Hot Market for Books About Bloodletting and

Delivering a Baby in 1669

Collectors with a love of medical history are bidding up the price of arcane texts; ‘I don’t need a car, but I certainly need a copy of Vesalius.’

By: Jared S. Hopkins, WSJ

Tim Opler was searching an online jewelry auction for a birthday gift for his wife when he stumbled upon something more interesting. 

The New York investment banker spent the next few hours scanning rare medical books and scooped up about 20 that piqued his interest. Since that day three years ago, he has acquired hundreds more, which he displays on shelves in his Manhattan office and estimates are worth $400,000.

His collection includes one of six copies of a 1669 guide to delivering babies. “Some guy 400 or 500 years ago did this, and I find that just amazing,” Opler said.

Brush off those old guides to bloodletting and treating a gunshot wound with boiling oil. You may be sitting on a gold mine.  

Bankers, doctors and others who share a love for medical history—and the crinkly feel of a centuries-old binding or manuscript—are bidding up the price of texts that illuminate the evolving understanding of human anatomy and treating patients.

More than $26 million in rare medical books are forecast to sell at auction in the 2020s, based on sales through 2024, marking a dramatic increase in demand for texts that had been fetching around $15 million a decade since the 1990s, according to Stifel Financial.

Collectors scour book fairs, travel together to famous libraries and compare notes in text-message groups and weekly Zoom gatherings. They spend thousands of dollars or more at auction to outbid each other and universities. With a heavy dose of admiration and a bit of envy, they recite the years and editions of each other’s texts.

“This is my life, not a hobby,” said Gene Flamm, 88, who fellow collectors consider the dean of the group. 

Flamm has a day job, as professor and chairman emeritus of neurosurgery at Montefiore Einstein Medical Center in New York City. He also finds time to lecture on old medical books and catalog his collection, with entries covering everything from the place where a book was printed to page measurements and the nature of its binding. The database runs 10 gigabytes. 

Flamm got hooked on old texts as a medical student in the 1960s. While a resident, he sold his used Porsche 356 B for $2,500 to pay for a 1555 copy of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem by 16th-century Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius.

“I said I don’t need a car, but I certainly need a copy of Vesalius,” Flamm said.

The 700-page-plus Fabrica is the ultimate trophy of rare medical book collectors, who view its illustrations as works of art. It is said to be the first comprehensive text to feature accurate descriptions of the human body based on dissections of dead patients.  

When a text like this becomes available, collectors don’t let anything get in the way of a score. Zlatko Pozeg, a cardiac surgeon in New Brunswick, Canada, once placed bids on a copy while performing a surgery. His nurse held the phone as he gave instructions. He won the auction. 

“I can look at these books and I feel like I’m enveloped by their wisdom, like part of their spirit is in the room with me,” Pozeg said. “It feeds your soul in a crazy way. I kind of have this unequal tranquility and solace that I just can’t get anywhere else.”

The $2.2 million sale last year of a 1555 edition of Fabrica brought international headlines to the world of rare medical book collecting.

The edition, which was sold to a university in Belgium called KU Leuven, contained crossed-out paragraphs, edited drawings, rewriting of text and fixes to punctuation and spelling. A Vesalius expert found the annotations were the work of the author, who was probably preparing a new version.

Gerard Vogrincic, the seller, said he bought the Vesalius edition for $14,520 in 2007. He said he was comfortable selling it, especially to a university where scholars can access it, because he plans to use the proceeds to fund further purchases.  

“I get a lot of excitement from the thrill of the hunt,” said Vogrincic, a retired pathologist in North Vancouver, Canada.

Collections can be built at any price point, thanks to the sheer number of books, the deteriorating conditions of some, and the varying significance of many. Fans say they constantly check auctions and booksellers online for new finds. Collections can get so large that owners struggle to store them.

[MedChi Member] Mario Molina, former chief executive of Molina Healthcare who got the collecting bug while a student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine learning about its co-founder William Osler, stored his 14,000 books in a room in his Los Angeles house until space ran out. 

“I thought, Aha, we have a guesthouse. I can fill my guesthouse up with books. And my wife said, ‘No, you get a room.’” They compromised by putting extra books in his home office. 

Flamm primarily stores his 2,000-book collection in the living room of his Manhattan Upper East Side apartment. It fills floor-to-ceiling glass shelves backed by panels illuminated with fluorescent bulbs to avoid heating the books. 

Before moving to Bloomington-Normal, Ill., recently retired cardiologist Brian Morrison had devoted 12 shelves in his Oregon home to books by a single author: a 16th century English physician named William Harvey who penned De Motu Cordis, the first text to show that blood pumped by the heart circulated throughout the human body.

Now, he is storing those and other books in 139 one-cubic-foot boxes, two larger boxes and six large tubs, while figuring out what to do with them.

Morrison acquired his first copy of Cordis two decades ago. “Then I realized, No, that wasn’t enough. I had to have every edition.” (He pines for the first edition of Cordis, published in 1628, but it hasn’t gone to auction in more than two decades and he says he probably can’t afford it.)

After buying English physician Evan Bedford’s papers at auction in 2020, Morrison discovered Winston Churchill’s electrocardiogram. “The heartbeat of the lion was in this lot,” Morrison said. “As a cardiologist myself I think that’s the coolest thing in the world.”

Mrs. Forbes-Robertson Hale and Med-Chi

Strictly speaking, this is not a medical post, but one about a woman who once spoke here at MedChi. Her name was Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, and she was an actress and suffragist in the first quarter of the 1900s.

At that time, many of the private schools were located in close proximity to the Faculty, so our Osler Hall would have been a prefect place for a gathering lead by a woman who was known as a champion of women!

Bryn Mawr and Roland Park Country are both all-girls schools, and the others are co-ed. It's sure that someone from Bryn Mawr knew Marcia Noyes, as their respective buildings were located across Cathedral Street from one another. 

Marcia had somewhat of a history with the suffrage movement, as evidenced in this blog post from earlier in 2024. 

I stumbled across this article from the Baltimore Sun while searching for something else.  Mrs. Forbes-Robertson Hale was lecturing at Osler Hall on Tuesday, March 2, 1926.   

We Need Your Support!

This has been a big year, for many reasons:

• In January, we started the 225th Anniversary year with a ceremony at the Maryland State House, where we were lucky enough to have the original charter documents on display. 
  
• In March, we held a reception for local non-profits, foundations and friends to show off the Museum of Maryland Medical History. 
  
• In June, on the exact 225th anniversary of the first meeting of the Founders of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty, we hosted the Grand Opening of the Museum.
  
• In September, the Director of the History of Maryland Medicine became a full-time, privately-funded, one-year position.
• In October, we launched our social media accounts on YouTube and Instagram, and reached 300,000 unique visits on this blog!
  
• In December, we are adding a significant amount of information on our portraits collection, gleaned from searching our historic Maryland Medical Journal.

This is what we've done, but now we need you to step up and help us with some funding, and with donations of items to be added to our Museum. 

Here's what we need funding for:

• The History of Maryland Medicine Director's position.
• Preservation of the art collection and archives.
• Acquisitions for items for the museum, which come up at auctions with some frequency.

Click the QR code below to make a financial donation. You will be able to select where you want your donation to be directed. 

We are also looking for material donations to the Museum.

• Items should be 100 years or older and have some relevance to our current collections. 
• Portraits of Founders or Past Presidents.
• 1700s and 1800s medical equipment.
• Pre-1900s medical books.
• Smaller medical collections.

If you would like to discuss making a material donation to the Museum, please contact Meg Fielding. 

Thank you for considering our request!

Echoes From the Past

A few weeks ago, MedChi hosted a practice session for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's Youth Orchestra. During their practice time, I usually do some work in the Rare Books Room, so I can be close by if there are any questions. 

The children that afternoon ranged from eight to twelve years old, and made up the two violin sections which were practicing. As I sat in the Rare Books Room, the sounds of their music came drifting down the marble staircase. It was perfection.

I was mostly looking for illustrations and engravings from older books that we can somehow use in our work. One of the things that I found really charming in the books was the shadows of the images on one page on the opposite page. A lot of old books with illustrations like this have a piece of tissue paper between the image and the page to prevent the shadowing.

Another thing that never ceases to amaze me is the detail in the images in these books, which were mostly printed in the 1800s. I think about the person engraving the prints, and how much talent they must have had. You can just barely see a shadow of something like a deer that has come from the opposite page.

Not only were they artists, they had to have a steady hand, and be able to engrave everything backwards.   

The Founding Document

On January 22, 2024, a group of MedChi's members, friends, Board members, and staffers gathered in Annapolis to celebrate 225 years. We worked with the Maryland State Archives for nearly a year to arrange for the original founding document to be present at the Procamation events at the State House. 

The Archives were kind enough to send us very high resolution scans of the original document. Please take a look and if the script is too difficult to read, the transcription is below the images.

An Act to establish and incorporate a Medical and Chirurgical Faculty or Society in the State of Maryland.

Whereas it appears to the General Assembly of Maryland that the establishment and incorporation of a Medical and Chirurgical Faculty or Society of Physicians and Surgeons in the said State, will be attended with the most beneficial and salutary consequences for promoting and disseminating Medical and Chirurgical knowledge throughout the State, and may in future prevent the citizens thereof from risking our lives in the hands of ignorant practitioners and pretenders to the healing art; Therefore,

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Maryland, that Gustavus Brown, William Lonsdale, Barton Tabbs, Elijah Jackson and William H. Roach of Saint Mary’s County;

James M. Anderson, Junior, Morgan Browne, Junior, Edward School, Robert Geddes, and Edward Warrell of Kent County;

Charles Alexander Warfield, Richard Hopkins, Wilson Waters, Thomas Noble Stockett and William Murray of Anne Arundel County;

Thomas Bourne, Thomas Parran, Joseph Ireland, Daniel Rawlings and James Gray of Calvert County;

John Parnham, Gustavus Richard Brown, Daniel Jenifer, John M. Daniel and Gerrard Wood of Charles County;

Thomas Cradock, Thomas Love, John Cromwell, Philip Trapnell, and Christopher Todd of Baltimore County;

Perry E. Noel, Stephen Theodore Johnson, Tristram Thomas and Ennalls Martin of Talbot County;

Levin Irving, Arnold Elzey, Ezekiel Haynie, John Woolford, and Mathias Jones of Somerset County;

Edward White, James Sullivane, Dorsey Wyville, William Hays and Thomas Goldsborough of Dorchester County;

Abraham Mitchell, William Miller, Elisha Harrison, John Grome and John King of Cecil County;

Richard J. Duckett, William Beanes, Junior, William Marshall; William Baker and Robert Pottinger of Prince Georges County;

Upton Scott, James Murray, John Thomas Shaff, and Reverdy Ghiselin of the City of Annapolis;

James Davidson, John Wells, Samuel Thompson, Robert Goldsborough and John Thomas of Queen Anne’s County;

John Neille, Thomas Fassett, George Washington Purnell, John Huston of Worcester County;

Philip Thomas, Francis Brown Sappington, William Hilleary, John Tyler and Joseph Sim Smith of Frederick County;

John Archer, Thomas H. Birckhead, Elijah Davis, and Thomas Archer of Harford County;

Jesse Downes, John Young, Junior, Benjamin Keene, Joseph Price, and Henry Helm of Caroline County;

George Brown, John Coulter, Miles Little John, George Buchanan, Lyde Goodwin, Ashton Alexander, Arthur Pue, Daniel Moore and Henry Stevenson of the City of Baltimore;

Richard Pindell, Samuel Young, Peter Waltz, Jacob Schnively, and Zachariah Claggett of Washinton County;

Edward Gantt, Charles Worthington, Joseph Hall, Zadock Magruder, Junior, and Charles Beatty of Montgomery County;

Benjamin Murrow, James Forbes and George Lynn of Allegany County;

And such persons as they may, from time to time, elect and their successors, are hereby declared to be one community, corporation, and body politic, forever, by and under the name and title of The Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland, and by and under the same name and title they shall be able and capable in law to purchase, take, have and enjoy, to them and their successors, in fee or for less estate or estates, any lands, tenements, rents, annuities, chattels, bank stock, registered debts or other public securities within this State, by the gift, bargain, sale or devise, or any person or persons, bodies politic or corporate, capable to make the same, and the same at their pleasure to alien, sell, transfer or lease and apply to such purposes as they may judge most conducive to the promoting and disseminating medical and surgical knowledge, or to alleviating the calamities and the miseries of their fellow citizens; provided nevertheless, that the said Faculty or body politic shall not, at any time, hold or profess property, real, personal or mixed, exceeding in total the sum of ten thousand dollars, per annum.

And be it enacted, that the members of the said Faculty above designated, may and shall hold their first meeting at the City of Annapolis on the first Monday in June next, or as soon thereafter as a number not less than fifteen of them can be convened, at which meeting they may appoint a President, a Secretary and Treasurer, make a common seal, and may elect into their body, such a medical and chirurgical practitioners, within this State as they may think qualified to become members of the Faculty.

And be it enacted, that it shall and may be lawful for the said Medical Faculty or any numbers of them, then attending, (not less than fifteen) to elect by Ballot, twelve persons of the greatest medical and chirurgical abilities in the State, who shall be styled the Medical Board of Examiners for the State of Maryland, seven of whom shall be residents of the Western and five of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, whose duty is shall be to grant licenses to such medical and chirurgical gentlemen as they, either upon a full examination, or upon the production of Diplomas from some respectable college, may judge adequate to commence the practice of the Medical and Chirurgical arts, each person so obtaining a certificate to pay a sum not exceeding Ten Dollars, to be fixed on or ascertained by the Faculty.

And be it enacted, that any five of the Examiners appointed for the Western and any three of those appointed for the Western Shore, shall constitute a Board on their respective shores for examining such candidates as may apply on the said shores respectively, and shall subscribe their names to each certificate by them granted, which certificate shall be also countersigned by the President of the Faculty and have the seal of the Faculty affixed thereto by the Secretary, upon the payment into the hands of the Treasurer of the sum of money to be ascertained as above by the Faculty, and any one of said Examiners may grant a license to practice until a Board in conformity to this act can be held

And be it enacted, that after the appointment of the aforesaid Medical Board, no person not already a practitioner of Medicine or Surgery, shall be allowed to practice in either of the said Branches, and receive payment for his services, without having first obtained a License, certified as by this Law directed, under the penalty of Fifty Dollars for each offense, to be recovered in the county court where he may reside by Bill of Presentment and Indictment, one half for the use of the Faculty and the other half for that of the Informer.

And be it enacted, that every person, who upon application, shall be elected a member of the Medical Faculty, shall pay a sum not exceeding Ten Dollars to be ascertained by the Faculty.

And be it enacted, that the said Medical Faculty be and they are hereby empowered from time to time to make such bylaws, rules and regulations, as they may find requisite; to break or alter their common seal; to fix the times and places for their general meetings, for the meetings of the Board of Examiners, the modes and times of electing Officers, filling up vacancies in the Medical Boards, and to do and perform such other things as may be requisite for carrying this act into execution and which may not be repugnant to the Constitution and Laws of this State or the United States.

By the House of Delegates                                      By the Senate

January 20, 1799                                                      January 20, 1799

Read and Assented to                                             Read and Assented to

By Order                                                                    By Order

Wm. Harwood                                                          A. Van Horn

A Visit to the Historical Collections at the Welch Library

I recently had the opportunity to spend the morning with the Curator of the Historical Collections at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Welch Library at Hopkins. 

As you arrive at the Library, located on Monument Street, the first thing that you see is a beautiful bronze bust of William Welch, MD in a gorgeous classical niche.

On the second floor, you will find a huge meeting/reading room with the famous John Singer Sargent portrait of the "big four" physicians from the founding days of the hospital: William Welch, William Halsted, William Osler and Howard Kelly. I had never seen the portrait in person and was gob-smacked at the massive size of it. It is about 10x9 feet!

Another portrait in the room is a beautiful painting of Mary Elizabeth Garrett, whose money helped open the medical school, with the condition that it admit women on the same basis as men.

There was also an exhibition of some of the works of Max Brödel, the first professional medical illustrator who worked with Kelly and Halsted, as well as Harvey Cushing. When I recently read a biography of Brödel, it mentioned that he summered on a lake in Canada with Thomas Cullen and some of the other physicians, and one of his hobbies was painting woodland scenes on tree fungi like mushroom conks. It was so fascinating to see some examples of this unique artwork.

One of the more disconcerting things to see was the death masque of Dr. Welch, made just after he died. The detail is incredible. 

The Henry Barton Jacobs Room was oddly reminiscent of the Osler Rooms at McGill University which I had visited several summers ago.

These two rooms were created at about the same time: 1930.

As we moved on, we began looking at some of the rare books in the collection and they were just amazing! One of the books from the 1600s had colored engravings which were so incredibly detailed.

Thinking of the process necessary to accomplish this was truly mind-boggling. 

One of my favorite books was this English-language book from MDCLXXV (1675).

It was literally an anatomical pop-up book, which was hilarious with strategically-placed foliage to shield sensitive eyes.

One of the interesting things about this book was that it included women! Most anatomical books were only illustrated with men. Here are some of my favorite illustrations. 

It was such a great to see these amazing books, and learn about the historic collections!