Napoleon and MedChi

As you may know, MedChi has the (alleged) medical case from Napoleon Bonaparte's physician from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. You can watch our brief video about it here.

We are updating the MedChi Museum of Maryland Medical History a bit and will be moving the Napoleon case to another wall. It currently has an old Piranesi print hanging above it, but that's from the wrong era.

Like Marcia, I am an inveterate auction-goer, and at a recent auction, I found an old 1880s cigarette card collection called "The Napoleon Album" published by the tobacco firm, Allen & Ginter from Richmond, Virginia. 

The booklet (not cigarette cards) contains a number of beautifully lithographed images of Napoleon's life, bound with a length of silk cording.

Although my copy is not in great condition, it is more than 140 years old, I did find high resolution copies of the book from Duke University's library. 

My plan is to frame the originals and hang them above the Napoleon Cabinet. 

   

We are 227 Years Old Today!

On this exact day, in 1799, the Maryland State Legislature passed an order to establish the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland.

Happy 227th birthday to us!

Giving Tuesday 2025

MedChi's Museum and Archives are an important part of MedChi’s 226 year history, and play a vital role in the history of medicine, both in Maryland and around the world

MedChi recently received a challenge grant in the amount of $50,000 to support the History of Medicine in Maryland and everything that the program does. Over the past year, the Office of the History of Maryland Medicine has accomplished the following:

• Moved the rare book collection from the stacks, which were not climate controlled. The books are now in the rare book room, and have been catalogued, so we have a current catalogue of what is in our collection. 
• Set up social media accounts, including the MedChi Archives Blog, YouTube and Instagram to highlight MedChi’s history, and the vast number of items in our collections.
• Sourced donations to the Museum, including an 1845 painting of Founder, Tristram Thomas, on permanent loan from the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine Alumni Office. This painting measures 8’ x 5.5’.
• Secured items for the rare book collections, including a set of fifty 1813 French medical dictionaries, a 1925 second impression of Cushing’s Osler book and four Osler books,  including a limited 1926 edition of the “Osler Number.” 
• Reached out to the community through events including open houses, ghost tours, lectures at local colleges, women’s history month symposia, and more. 
• Catalogued thousands of photographs and scans so that anyone who accesses them in the future will know who, what, when, and where. 
• Met with colleagues in medical history, archives, and adjacent fields, and conducted tours with curators of local museums, historic houses, and archives. 
• Spoke at the annual American Osler Society’s conferences. The Director is now a Fellow of the American Osler Society.
• Wrote a biography of Marcia Crocker Noyes, an acolyte of Sir William Osler, who shaped the organization that MedChi is today.

However, historic preservation is not a job we can do by ourselves, and we need your financial help to support the continued care of these archival and museum pieces. At times over the past decades, our history has not played an important role at MedChi, and when we’ve searched through the archives, studied our paintings, and looked at our rare books, we’ve been dismayed to find that they’ve suffered the damage of the aging process. For the past ten years, we have worked to ensure that this no longer happens.

Please click here to match our generous challenge grant and support the work preserving the MedChi Museum and Archives.

Thank you very much!

 
Meg Fairfax Fielding
Director of the History of Maryland Medicine

Carroll County Farm Museum

A few months ago, I got an email from the curator at the Carroll County Farm Museum telling me that they had found a number of items that had been loaned by MedChi in 1962. 

In late August, I made the trek up to Westminster to see what we had lent to them. They knew what items had been ours because of our unusual identification system - acquisition numbers painted in red nail polish. 

By Maryland law, after this much time has passed, legally, the Farm Museum now owns everything we lent them, but mostly, I was interested to see what they had. 

Almost everything had a note attached to it that the item had been donated by physicians from Carroll County.  

As we went through the items, one of us checked our Medical Annals of Maryland to see if we could find out about the donor, and another checked Google to see if we could figure out what the item was, as everything was not marked.

This was one of my favorite pieces, and if I could have snuck it out in my bag, I would have. It is a late 1800's inhaler for anesthesia or ether. It was a beautifully made English transferware piece, which I collect. 

There were several other inhalers, but they weren't nearly as glamorous! This is called Gwathmey's Gas Ether Inhaler. You can see where the bottom parts fits over your mouth and nose. 

Honestly, I hadn't been to the Carroll County Farm Museum for decades, so it was fun to visit again! 

Camp Seyon

A few weeks ago, I received an email from someone in Vermont whose family had owned the property that was Marcia Noyes' Camp Seyon (Noyes in reverse) on Lake George. 

Marcia ran a summer camp for girls for a number of years, finally selling the property in the 1930s. We have old advertisements for the camp, recruiting both counselors and campers. 

At first, the only building housed the kitchen with its huge, wood burning, cast iron stove and the great room with floor to ceiling book shelves, used principally as a dining hall for the girl's camp that had existed there since the turn of the century.

From an article about the property I found online: 

The girls slept on narrow, World War I army cots in large canvas tents rigged on wooden platforms.  Marcia Noyes (Seyon is Noyes spelled backward), who ran the camp, was an internationally known medical librarian at Johns Hopkins University the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland.

Johns Hopkins The Faculty provided her a penthouse apartment in Maryland and the Medical Librarians Association still gives out a yearly award in her honor. But Miss Noyes' summers were dedicated to the camp and her girls. Marcia had the Main House floated down from an island in the Narrows on a barge as the Camp was, then, a virtual island. A boggy path led across the isthmus to the peninsula but vehicles were left on the mainland.

After she sold the Camp, it seemed to remain in one family for several generations. When they finally sold it in the early 2000s, they kept a lot of things from the property. Among the items were some pieces from the Camp Seyon years. 

As one of the descendants was going through the papers, etc. he realized that they should be with Marcia's documents at MedChi, and not with the family, so he kindly sent them to us!

There were numerous ink printings of various ferns from the property, along with the scientific names and descriptions, all in Marcia's handwriting.

Additionally, there were some notes and letters, plus catalogues of various camping supplies. 

Here are some more pieces which were in the box.

We greatly appreciate the family's foresight in making sure that we received the documents from Camp Seyon, and they weren't just thrown away.

Hopkins School of Medicine Photos in the Osler Years

I was going through some of our old Osler books, as well as the ones I recently acquired (see last post), and scanned in a bunch of pictures. Because of the age of the books, they are all out of copyright, so I am republishing some of them here. 

See how many of the names you recognize from Old Baltimore Medicine days!

Elegant Old Bills

A while ago, I came across a box of paper ephemera, and couldn't resist going through it, sheet by sheet. What struck me was the elegance of many of the bills. They were all engraved with either the logo of the company, or the building in which it was located. Here are a few of my favorites.

Most of the engravings were either done by Hoen Lithography or E. Sachse & Co., who did the incredible map of Baltimore. 

The Mistake on the Seal!

I am going to tell you a story about MedChi’s historic seal.

It became part of our “brand” soon after our founding in 1799. Eventually, it was one of several bookplates for book collections that were funded by donors, such as the Frick Family.

It was a rather dour looking piece, with the figure of Aesculapius with his serpent-entwined staff. It was originally rendered in red and black, with deep-set eyes. He was known as “old potato head.”

In our centennial book, there is a slightly different version of the potato head with more hair and more rays emanating from his head.

After we moved into the new building in 1909 and the library continued to grow, we asked the medical illustrator, Max Brödel to design an updated seal for us. You can see the date on Brödel’s original sketch of the seal.

It wasn’t until the 1930’s that it was finally engraved, and hundreds of copies were printed to place in our book collections.

Soon, we received a letter from one of our members, letting us know that there was a mistake on the seal. Around the bottom edge of the seal are a few words in the Greek alphabet. One of the letters is incorrect. 

And because that letter is wrong, it changes the meaning of the sentence! It should read, “A physician is of more value than many other men for the dressing of wounds and the stilling of pain,” from Homer’s Illiad, Book II, Line 514.

The mistake was combining a Greek Z and a Greek X, when there is no such letter. It should have been three parallel lines, with the middle one a little shorter.

The mistake was corrected, and new bookplates were printed.

We still have some digital copies of the mistaken seal, but I try and check to make sure we’re using the correct one.  

A Rare Book Mystery

A few days ago, a friend sent me an auction listing for a book that was once owned by our Sir William Osler.

Pasted onto the cover of the book is a letter from Sir William to Marcia Noyes, our librarian. It was written about six months before he died. At the end is a personal PS "Love to you all."

Marcia and Sir William were close friends from the time he hired her in 1896, until his death in 1919.

But how did this, and two other books signed by William Osler, end up at an auction house in Connecticut?

Of course, I had to do some sleuthing. First, I culled through our records, but could find nothing. Next, I looked through the catalogue from Swann's Auction House in NYC, where we'd sold a number of our rare books in the early 2000's. No record.

Then I called the auction house who told me that the consigner was an old client of theirs. They called him and then called me back to tell me that the client had purchased the book from a rare book dealer in Baltimore about 20 years ago.

Something pinged in my brain. About 20 years ago, a low-level staffer had contracted to sell all of the books in our stacks, about 55,000, to a rare book dealer. When the powers-that-be found out, they put a stop to the sale.

But, in the interim, the dealer must have "acquired" some of our books, among them, the three that are in this auction, and that was how the consigner acquired them.

Not everyone appreciates history the way I do, nor understands how important it is to retain items from our past.

Most people won't understand the relationship between Marcia and Dr. Osler. As mentioned above, they were close friends from the time he hired her in 1896 until his death in 1919.

There are dozens of letters between the two of them, all very friendly and affectionate. There are little cards from bouquets that Osler sent Marcia wishing her a happy birthday, or sending congratulations.

When Osler moved to England in 1905, they stayed in touch and she visited him in Oxford several times. He frequently sent rare books for the Library at MedChi, including two copies of Vesalius Anatomy.

We will bid on the books, but I am sure the final price will exceed my budget. All that I can hope is that the book finds a good home.

Diploma Signed by Benjamin Rush Auctioned

A few weeks ago, I spotted an interesting item at a local auction. It was a medical school diploma signed by Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), who was, in addition to being a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a medical pioneer.

Benjamin Rush by Charles Wilson Peale

After graduating from what is now Princeton University at age 14, Rush was also a physician, politician, civic leader in Philadelphia, social reformer, educator, and founder of Dickenson College in Pennsylvania. One of his greatest contributions to medicine was the establishment of a public dispensary, or clinic for low-income patients. 

Dr. Rush is mentioned several times in the Annals of Maryland Medicine, published in 1899 by Eugene Cordell, and trained a number of physicians who practiced in Maryland. 

This is the diploma, which was issued to someone named Benjamin Sedwick from the Philadelphia Medical Society in 1806. 

This is the description from the auction catalogue:

Description

Benjamin Rush (1745-1813, Signer of Declaration of Independence, medical pioneer and polymath) Part-printed certificate from the Medical Society of Philadelphia, February 12, 1806, issued to Benjamin Sedwick; on vellum, with original ribbon and wax seal (in a protective tin case), 9 1/4 x 13 1/2 in.

The certificate sold for $2,000 plus 6% tax and a 25% buyer's premium.