The Two Mary Garretts and Medicine

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture on the two Mary Garretts. One was Mary Garrett by birth and one by marriage. They were polar opposites in many ways, but the intersected through medicine. Here's the story, complete with my slides to illustrate:

Once upon a time in Baltimore, lived two women named Mary Garrett. One was named that by birth and the other by marriage. Both had more money than they could ever spend, and for both of them, that money came from the founding family of the B&O Railroad, the Garretts. Both are credited with being philanthropic, but in two different ways.

Baltimore, and Maryland are littered with buildings, streets, and locations named after the family, think Garrett County in Western Maryland.

But first, let’s look at the back story!

John Work Garrett was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 31 July 1820. At the age of 16, he became an associate in his father's business, Robert Garrett & Sons, and at 19 he became a clerk in the firm. In 1855, he was elected to the Board of Directors for the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad. Three years later, on November 17, 1858, he was elected President of the B&O Railroad - a position he held for 26 years.

John Garrett and the B&O Railroad played a key role in helping to preserve the Union during the Civil War. The nation's first railroad assumed the important role of transporting soldiers, equipment, supplies, and wounded. The Civil War was the first war in which railroads were used extensively. At the outbreak of the war, the B&O became the nation's most important railroad because it linked Washington, D.C., to the rest of the Union, and allowed soldiers to move quickly into Virginia, as well as Confederate territory to the west.

Although Garrett sympathized with the southern cause, his business allegiance was to the Union. While neither a soldier nor a politician, his counsel was highly respected and trusted. He was frequently called to Washington, D.C., for advice on transportation affairs. Throughout the war, Garrett could be found either in Baltimore (Camden Station where Camden Yards is now located) where he received reports and issued orders for movement of trains, or along the B&O rail lines trying to maintain the morale of his men.

John Work Garrett married Rachel Ann Harrisson (1823–1883), and the couple had four children, Robert, Henry, John, and Mary, who was the youngest and only girl.

Garrett began purchasing B&O Railroad stock early, when the railroad was competing with the newly completed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which paralleled the Potomac River from Georgetown to Cumberland and the National Road.

Following a motion by board member Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), the largest stockholder since 1847 as well as chairman of the financial committee, John Garrett became the B&O's new president. Hopkins, a Maryland native, had made his substantial fortune in Baltimore. The Garrett Company as well as the B&O had strong ties to the London-based George Peabody & Company, and through their business interests, financier George Peabody (1795–1869).

At Johns Hopkins' request, Garrett arranged a dinner meeting with Peabody and Hopkins, and the very next day Hopkins announced his intention to establish a hospital and university. While this story is uncorroborated, Peabody likely did influence Hopkins in deciding what to do with his wealth.

John Work Garrett's daughter, Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1854–1915), a civic activist, philanthropist in her own right and suffragist, helped fund the Bryn Mawr School, the Baltimore Museum of Art (1914), and secured the admission of women to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as a condition of her bequest to supplement the endowment of Hopkins' from twenty years before. Thus, the new Hopkins medical college became one of the nation's first co-educational schools in 1893.

Mary’s education was rather peripatetic. She attended the private Miss Kummer’s School in Mount Vernon, beginning at age twelve. While there, she met two girls who would become her lifelong friends: Julia Rebecca Rogers, aka Dolly, and Elizabeth King, aka Bessie. All three girls were from wealthy families, and after Dolly’s father died, she became a ward of John Garrett.

While Mary initially liked school, she soon became bored with the school’s philosophy of “cultivation not college.” Girls were not allowed to study science, so Dolly, Bessie, and Mary formed a study group, and to the shock of everyone, dissected a rat!

Disappointed with the lackluster experiences of school education, Mary quit school at age seventeen and never returned to school. She was self-taught in literary classics, and spoke fluent Italian and French and practiced German and Greek.

John Garrett always said of Mary, that she was his child who had the best business brain, and he wished she had been a boy. But at the time, women didn’t go into business settings, especially one as powerful as the B&O Railroad. However, he did allow her to attend business meetings with him, and she later became his personal secretary and had the opportunity to meet many of the business titans of the time.

Adolescence was not a period of comfort and happiness for Garrett. She felt uncomfortable with the Victorian expectations of women at the time and was also uncomfortable with the attitude towards sex in her family. Every family member avoided sex-related topics on purpose, and she had to teach herself about puberty.

Garrett showed interests in business and managed her personal financial matters by herself during this time period. Given a weekly allowance of five to ten dollars per week, she kept record of all expenses in her notebook. Besides, she kept all the letters from her relatives and friends, including Julia and Elizabeth.

Garrett also kept a diary, which was given to her by the philanthropist and longtime friend of the Garret family, George Peabody, the respectable founder of the Peabody Institute and the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.

After leaving school, she continued to learn from her father about commerce and the operation of a railroad company, later serving as his secretary. John Garrett also taught his daughter by example in his philanthropy. Garrett’s giving was influenced by his friend George Peabody, and he maintained close ties with Johns Hopkins, serving as a trustee of both Hopkins’s university and hospital.

Interestingly, Mary never continued her education, blaming herself for her difficulties in academic achievement which she thought could be linked to medical problems with her uterus. Others attributed her health problems to Garrett’s stifling, conservative world in which her father prohibited her from pursuing marriage, college or a career, as the cause of her mental collapse, or ‘neurasthenia’ in Victorian terms, at the age of 25.

When she inherited nearly $2 million upon her father’s death, Mary Garrett would employ the lessons she gleaned from the example of her father and his friends and become a philanthropist in her own right.

Mary Garrett relied heavily on her intimate circle of friends, known as the “Friday Evening.” The intellectually curious group included M. Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth “Bessie” King, and Julia Rogers—all but one of them daughters of trustees of Johns Hopkins University, the hospital, or both. It was with this group that Garrett collaborated on her two key philanthropic achievements: the Bryn Mawr School and Johns Hopkins Medical School.

The Bryn Mawr School was Garrett’s first philanthropic undertaking. The Friday Evening group was appalled by the lack of a serious college preparatory school for girls in Baltimore. Garrett’s inheritance provided the means to remedy the situation. They decided to act.

They named the new preparatory school for Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, after acquiring the school’s permission to do so. (They also maintained close ties to the college, and Bryn Mawr school students were required to pass the college entrance examination in order to graduate.)

Garrett not only provided the necessary funds to establish and build the school, she also closely oversaw the project. Her hands-on involvement extended to the selection of gym equipment and artwork for the school, which was located but a few blocks from Garrett’s home in Baltimore on Cathedral and Preston Streets. The Friday Evening served as the governing body of the school. Garrett was its president.

Garrett and the Friday Evening Group then set their sights higher—the education of women at Johns Hopkins University. Garrett first attempted to open the doors of Johns Hopkins to women in 1887 by offering the university $35,000 to establish a coeducational school of science. The university president and trustees rejected her offer.

Just a few years later, however, Johns Hopkins found itself on unsure financial footing. The opening of the medical school had been delayed due to insufficient funds. The Friday Evening saw an opportunity.

Garrett enlisted her friends and sought support from other influential women around the country (including Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. Leland Stanford, and First Lady Mrs. Benjamin Harrison) to raise funds to approach the university with a new offer. Garrett offered the trustees $100,000 (half of which she contributed personally) to pay for the opening of the medical school on one condition: that men and women would be admitted on equal standing. The board accepted the offer, but then told the group that the school could not open with less than $500,000.

When the university and the newly formed Women’s Medical Fund Committee struggled to approach this number, Garrett stepped in and covered the difference with $307,000. But her additional funding came with additional conditions. These new conditions required that the medical school be a full graduate school leading to a medical degree and that all applicants be required to have a bachelor’s degree in the field of science (neither of these stipulations were normal to medical schools in the country at the time).

Garrett’s funding and her clearly outlined conditions not only opened medical education to America’s women, they also turned Johns Hopkins into the first modern medical school in the United States. In his history of the school, Alan Chesney concludes: “To this lady, more than any other single person, save only Johns Hopkins himself, does the School of Medicine owe its being.”

Throughout the rest of her life, Garrett would continue to use her wealth and influence to promote women’s education and opportunity. She gave generously to Bryn Mawr College and later became a major funder of the cause of women’s suffrage. Her final years were spent at Bryn Mawr with her close friend M. Carey Thomas, who was president of the college, to whom Garrett left her fortune upon her death in 1915.

Thomas and Garrett lived for many years together at the Deanery which Garrett lavishly decorated with works of original art and fine furniture. The Deanery was, as well as a private residence for Thomas and Garrett (and Mamie Gwinn before her), a formal entertainment space used for faculty parties, dinners for visiting speakers and for student teas and other entertainments included both Garrett and Thomas’ names on the printed invite).

For her bargain with the Johns Hopkins medical school, Garrett is sometimes called America’s greatest “coercive philanthropist.” William Osler, one of the school’s four founding physicians, famously replied: “It was a pleasure to be bought.”

While Osler appreciated Mary Elizabeth Garrett for spearheading the Women's Medical School Fund and also for conceiving and funding John Singer Sargent's portrait, The Four Doctors (1905), he was very close to her sister-in-law, Mary Sloan Frick Garrett, later Jacobs. 

Mary apparently did not warm to Osler as much as she did to the other portrait-sitters: the pathologist William Henry Welch, the gynecologist Howard Atwood Kelly, and the surgeon William Stewart Halsted, who was her close personal friend and also one of her physicians. John Singer Sargent also painted a portrait of Mary Elizabeth Garrett which hangs in the William Welch Building at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

After Mary Elizabeth Garrett died, Jacobs joined a lawsuit brought by his wife and other Garrett family members against M. Carey Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Garrett's longtime partner to whom she left most of her estate. They ultimately lost. Whether the Oslers would have been close to Mary Elizabeth Garrett had it not been for the feud among the siblings is, of course, speculative. 

Thomas and Garrett shared much in their ambitions for women in their contemporary society and worked closely on issues such as suffrage and access to higher education. Their letters reveal their shared aims, their intellectual exchanges, joint passions for art, literature, poetry and engagement with prominent scholars of their time, and their very different personalities that somehow seemed to work together in creating partnership, friendship and intimacy that lasted over four decades.

Mary Sloan Frick Garrett Jacobs

Mary Sloan was the daughter of William Frederick Frick, who was born in Baltimore in 1817 to William and Mary Sloan Frick. He was educated at Baltimore City College and graduated from Harvard in 1835, at a very young age. He was admitted to the bar in 1839. He lectured on matters of science and public interest, but was not a physician like his brother, Charles Frick.

Frick took especial interest in the public school system of the day and as President of the School Board contributed a great deal to support educational progress. As a lawyer it has been said of him that he was one whom any colleague might envy, and any adversary might fear. He later became a judge of the Superior Court of Baltimore. He was also a significant supporter of MedChi.

Mary Sloan Frick was born in 1847, was privately educated by governesses and tutors and was not permitted to leave home without the accompaniment of a tutor or family member.

The Fricks employed tutors and a governess to educate Mary and her sister in music, art, literature, and handiwork. Social graces were emphasized: inviting guests to tea was a treasured tradition. Out of affection and respect for her parents, Mary modeled her values on theirs—values that she held her entire life.

In 1872, Mary wed Robert Garrett, the oldest son of John W. Garrett, who was president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Robert Garrett & Sons Bank.

After his father’s death in 1884, Robert was elected president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He endeared himself to the employees (unlike his father, who had exploited them), and did much for his city. But by the mid-1890s the second Robert Garrett was a sick man, apparently from kidney disease. In 1886, his physician advised an extended trip. Garrett went west with a group of friends in private rail cars. Reaching San Francisco, he decided to extend the trip around the world, for which he needed a personal physician.

Enter Henry Barton Jacobs. He received his B.A. in 1883 and his M.D. in 1887, both from Harvard University.  In 1897, after the entourage returned to Baltimore from their world tour, Jacobs chose to stay on and moved in with the Garretts. It was the ultimate concierge practice—a single, ultra-rich patient—but not an easy one, as Garrett by then had mental as well as physical illness.

While abroad on a trip planned to ease his nerves, his tenuous health was further hampered by the unexpected death of his beloved brother, Thomas Harrison, in a yachting accident. Garrett lived eight years in a state of precarious health before dying in 1896. 

After Garrett died in 1896, Jacobs, who had become especially interested in tuberculosis, became more closely associated with the Johns Hopkins Hospital and its medical school. He actively participated in organizations directed toward the treatment and eradication of tuberculosis. In 1911, Jacobs was elected a trustee of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, a position he held until his death.

Jacobs quietly married Mary Frick Garrett in 1902. Together, they cultivated interests in the fine arts and the history of medicine. In 1932, he donated his collection of medical books, medallions, and engravings to the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of the History of Medicine. He also provided funding for a room to house the collection.

A connoisseur of fine art and architecture, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs built a major collection of European painting and sculpture which she housed in a sumptuous mansion on Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore. There she entertained lavishly, becoming the leading arbiter of Baltimore society.

Mary Sloan was known as “the Mrs. Astor of Baltimore's 400,” the ultimate social arbiter. To have her bow to one at the opera, at the races, or at any other social event was to have one's social position acknowledged; to have her show up at a party for even a few minutes declared the evening a success; and to be invited to her home proved that one had “arrived.” She epitomized the excesses of America's Gilded Age.

At this time, both the pro- and anti-vote women were meeting at Osler Hall at the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. The two groups agreed not to bother each other and their meetings. One man was caught in the middle of the two Marys.

Dr. William Osler was very close friends with Mary Garrett Jacobs and Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs. But he was also the Chief of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and had been with the Hospital since it opened. Mrs. Jacobs considered the Oslers one of the few people who were her peers in Baltimore.

Neither Osler nor his wife became close to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, who was the second Robert Garrett's younger sister and therefore Mary Frick Jacobs's sister-in-law. They could not have been more different. Not surprisingly, she clashed frequently with her more socially progressive sister-in-law Mary Elizabeth Garrett and publicly opposed her notable causes. Her sister-in-law did all she could to dissuade her wealthy friends from contributing to the Women's Medical School Fund, and she later served as president of the Baltimore chapter of the Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, thus countering another cause célèbre of Mary Elizabeth Garrett. Despite her strong opposition to coeducation and women’s suffrage, she supported many worthy charitable causes during her lifetime.

But Mary was not without a philanthropic spirit. To honor her first husband, she established the Robert Garrett Hospital for Children on North Carey Street, as well as a training school for nurses attached to the hospital. She provided funding for the children to recuperate in Mount Airy, Maryland, during the summer months and for the cost of the railway fares for mothers to visit their children whenever they wished.

Mary’s home in Baltimore City is now known as the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, home to the Engineers Club, named for the men who re-built Baltimore after the Great Fire of 1904. The home was inspired by those on the Champs del Elysees in Paris, Garrett wanted a similar park in front of his own home. Henri Cremier designed the fountain that graces that space.

Robert and Mary Garrett hired Gilded Age architect Stanford White of architectural firm McKim, Mead and White to help them realize their vision of a beautiful home that would compare with other Gilded Age homes in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The renovations would continue for thirty-two years until the house included over forty rooms, sixteen fireplaces, and one hundred windows.

Given her demands, Stanford White initiated several extraordinarily beautiful details including the spiral staircase, the entrance fireplace with inglenooks, and the hanging Venetian lamp. He also designed the family dining room in Renaissance style, featuring tapestries on the walls, elaborately carved cabinets, painted black to suggest ebony. All of the downstairs rooms opened onto a courtyard of exotic plants, a parrot, and a monkey. 

After Mary’s marriage to Dr. Jacobs, they enlarged the house by purchasing the adjacent townhouse. It was “renovated” by John Russell Pope, who would later design the Baltimore Museum of Art which housed much of Mary’s art collection.

Her Newport home was the lost Whiteholme estate. Completed in 1903, for Mrs Mary Sloan (Frick) Garrett, the widow of Robert Garrett. Having stood at the corner of Narragansett and Ochre Point Avenue, Whiteholme was among Newport's most impressive French Neo-Baroque mansions put up during the Gilded Age.

A third house, Uplands, located west of Baltimore City in what would have been the county, was a forty-two-room Victorian mansion. The property formerly belonged to General John Swan, Mary Jacobs' great-grandfather, as a part of his larger Hunting Ridge estate. Mary Frick and her husband Robert stayed at the house on Mount Vernon Place between November and Easter then returned to Uplands every spring. In 1885, they hired E. Francis Baldwin, architect for the B&O Railroad, to renovate the property. Mary continued to use the property as a resident up until her death in 1936 when she left the building to the Episcopal Church.

The prenuptial contract specified that neither husband nor wife could lay claim to the other's property and that each could dispose of their properties as they saw fit. Despite, or perhaps because of, this stipulation, it was reported in a gossip column that “Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs is the most devoted husband in Newport. He seems unable to do enough for his wife, and waits on her hand and foot.”

Dr. and Mrs. Jacobs travelled extensively for the next few decades, taking ocean liners to Europe, crossing the United States in private train cars, entertaining, collecting art (her) and historic medical books (him), until they began slowing down. 

Mary Sloan Frick Garrett Jacobs died in 1936, and Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs died in 1939. They are buried next to each other in Baltimore's elegant Greenmount Cemetery.

Their house on Mount Vernon Place went through several owners, including a funeral home and the Masons, until a plan was hatched to knock it down and make it a parking lot! Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and it was acquired by the Engineers Club, remnants of the men who had re-built Baltimore after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. 

The Graveyard of Dr. William Beanes

Saturday was the first warm and sunny day in months, and so I decided to take a spin down to Southern-ish Maryland and visit the graves of Dr. William Beanes, and his wife. 

As I followed the GPS directions and entered the town of Upper Marlboro, I had to hunt a bit for the grave-site. It was up a hill with no path or steps, adjacent to the abandoned Upper Marlboro High School. 

I made my way around to the back of the school where there was a path to the grave-site. It is now a small lot, on the site of the home he had shared with his wife. The house was known as Academy Hill, said to be one of the finest houses in the town. It overlooked the aptly named Schoolhouse Pond. Dr. and Mrs. Beanes lived in the house from 1779 to 1828.

Although the original house burned in 1855, it was re-built and opened as Upper Marlboro Academy. In 1836 the president of the Upper Marlboro Academy's Board of Trustees was authorized to purchase the Beanes’ property from a Mr. Roderick McGregor, for $1,360. 

A Mr. Henry M. McGregor contracted to alter and add to the old William Beanes dwelling for use as an Academy. The building was completed and ready for pupils on January 1, 1837. The school building used prior to that date was sold to the Vestry of the Trinity Church. 

A representative of the Academy Board of Trustees reported to the State General Assembly annually,3 and the State provided an annual fund to the Academy, enabling it to provide free education to some indigent students. 

Tuition for most students was $20 per year in 1835, and $10 more for a mathematical education. The Academy admitted both boys and girls and in 1844 had 60 pupils, including some from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

There are four brick pillars around the graveyard, topped ironically with cannon balls, with two additional pillars at the entrance, all of which are connected with an ironwork fence. 

The pillars have plaques on them, one dedicated by the Daughters of the War of 1812,

and the other by the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1914. 

Additionally, there is the William Beanes Elementary School and the adjacent William Beanes Community Center. 

Baltimore's Historic Hospitals, Part 2 (1850-1950)

Earlier this year, I taught a class called "Baltimore's History Through Its Buildings" and one of the sections was about Baltimore's historic hospitals. You can see Part 1 of this lecture here. I have illustrated this lecture with both historic and contemporary photographs, engravings, and paintings from MedChi’s collection of historic portraits. 

Name: Sheppard Asylum                                                Founded: 1853

Moses Sheppard was a Baltimore merchant and Quaker. Sheppard had a desire to improve conditions for individuals with mental illness, and envisioned an institution that would feel more like a home than a prison, would treat patients with respect and dignity, and would be surrounded by greenery. Upon his death in 1857, Sheppard left his entire fortune to the building of The Sheppard Asylum, the largest bequest ever made to mental health at that time.

Moses Sheppard’s vision was shared by Enoch Pratt, a local merchant and philanthropist. He admired what was happening at The Sheppard Asylum, so on his death in 1896, he left a two-million dollar endowment for The Sheppard Asylum and the institution was renamed Sheppard-Pratt.

The elegant original buildings were designed by the architect Calvert Vaux. The most notable feature of the hospital is the quaint gatehouse on Charles Street.

Name: Baltimore City Hospital/College of Physicians & Surgeons       Founded:  1872

College of Physicians and Surgeons was incorporated in 1872 with 43 students. After a merger with Washington University in 1878, CP&S moved to their campus at the Northeast corner of Calvert and Saratoga Streets which was connected to the Baltimore City Hospital. By 1880, the combined school had an enrollment of 336 students from 23 states. All were men. 

The college had total medical control over Maternite Hospital, the Maryland Lying-in Asylum, the Hospital for the Colored Race, the Dispensary, and the Pasteur Department for the Treatment of Rabies. CP&S also used the Bay View Hospital and the Nursery and Child's Hospital, so that students had excellent opportunity for clinical experience. The hospital is the current Mercy Medical Center.

Name: Hebrew Orphan Asylum                             Founded: 1873

The Hebrew Orphan Asylum was organized in 1872 as a safe haven for Jewish immigrants and children. Originally, it was funded by private contributions from prominent Hebrews in the city of Baltimore. In 1874 it was destroyed by fire and was rebuilt in 1876 at a cost of $50,000. It had a capacity of 150 inmates.

The younger children were taught at the Asylum, and the older children went to local public schools. The boys were taught a trade and the girls became seamstresses at local stores.

The orphanage moved to West Belvedere Avenue in 1923 once a better foster care system was established the eventual location of Sinai Hospital. It reopened as the West Baltimore General Hospital and later, Lutheran Hospital until the 1980’s when it closed once again.

The Hebrew Orphan Asylum has recently been completely renovated by Southway Builders and is not the Center for Health Care and Healthy Living.

Name: Johns Hopkins Hospital                              Founded: 1873

Founded in 1873 by Johns Hopkins with an endowment of $3 million, construction began in 1877, with buildings designed by Nielson and Niernsee. Originally intended to be built at what is now Clifton Park, it was moved to a location on Broadway because Clifton Park was too far away from the city.

The first patients were not admitted until 1888. The “Big Four” William Osler, William Welch, William Halsted and Howard Kelly all helped establish the medical school, as well as its reputation as one of the top hospitals in the world.

Hopkins was one of the first medical schools to admit women, mainly because one of the original main donors, Mary Garrett, required this to before she would give them the funding they needed.

In the 1884 Directory of Medical Organizations, the University of Maryland gets about six pages, and Johns Hopkins, which had not yet opened, gets one paragraph. 

Name: Marine Hospital (USPH)                          Founded: 1880

The original Marine Hospital in Baltimore was established to care for merchant seamen and sailors on American-registered ships who became sick or were injured in the line of duty. It later became the U.S. Public Health Services Hospital, also serving military and civilian populations. Potential patients initially applied at the Custom House downtown, and depending on their condition, they were moved to the hospital at Wyman Park. This later became a US Public Health Hospital, and now is part of the Hopkins University Campus.

Name: Baltimore Medical College                        Founded: 1881

Baltimore Medical College was founded by a group of seven Baltimore physicians. The school advertised itself as a “practical Christian medical school.” Among the twenty graduates in 1883 were four women, the last to be admitted to the school. In 1885, Maryland General Hospital was added to the college, as was a dental department. The 1907-08 catalog shows that BMC attracted 425 matriculates from 22 states and eight foreign countries.

The original offices of the college were in the YMCA building at 93 North Paca Street. By 1888, BMC had completed the purchase of property on North Howard Street, just north of Madison. In 1895, a new five-story college building at the NE corner of Howard Street and Linden Avenue had been built. This contained a 600-seat lecture hall, a 500-seat amphitheater, the dispensary, and four laboratories. Adjoining, was a five-story hospital building called Maryland General Hospital, and part of that hospital was a maternity ward.

In 1913 Baltimore Medical College merged with the University of Maryland Medical College, but the ownership of Maryland General Hospital continued to be separate until it reunited with the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Name: Bon Secours Hospital                                  Founded: 1881

In 1881, the Sisters of Bon Secours sent three of their members to Baltimore at the request of Cardinal Gibbons. Their convent was located at West Baltimore and Payson Streets.

By 1907, there were about 20 nuns at the Bons Secours Baltimore mission, busily nursing the sick, caring for children and performing other duties. In 1919, they did something that was not part of their original mission: they built a 20-bed hospital.

In 1921, the Sisters built their own nursing school, adjacent to the hospital. All Bon Secours nuns become nurses, and “the order trained its own for many years.”

Since then, the hospital has grown continuously: in 1958, a new wing was built; in 1964, a new intensive-care unit; in 1972, a new emergency room. It is now part of the LifeBridge group of hospitals.

Name: Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital                       Founded: 1882

Founded in 1877, the Presbyterian Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat Charity Hospital was located at 1017 E. Baltimore St, where the building still stands. It was founded by noted Civil War surgeon and former Dean of the U of Maryland School of Medicine, Dr. Julian John Chisolm, one of the earliest professors of ENT surgery. Along with the Hospital for the Women of Maryland in Bolton Hill where I was born, it was one of the founding institutions of today's Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson.

Baltimore Charity E&E, E&E Dispensary of Church Home, E&E of Baltimore General Dispensary, also, Baltimore Throat Dispensary all merged in 1882 to become the Baltimore Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital

The Presbyterian Eye, Ear & Throat Charity Hospital Board of Governors' recent leadership gift created a permanent and lasting legacy within the walls of GBMC that will sustain and grow the Cochlear Implant Center

Name: Women’s Medical College                                                Founded: 1882     
Name: Evening Dispensary for Working Women & Girls    Founded: 1891

In an era when most women were not admitted to medical schools, Baltimore was founding its own medical college for women. The Women’s Medical College was founded by several of our own Faculty’s members, Dr. Randolph Winslow and Dr. Thomas Ashby. There was also a Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia at the time.

The Founders’ ambition was to provide a medical college for women of the highest standard, so they imposed a preliminary exam for all applicants in order to be admitted. There were on-site clinics and labs and for practical experience, the students worked at Good Samaritan Hospital and the Hospital Maternité.

The Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls provided outpatient medical care and advice to women. It was especially important for two reasons: women could not leave work in the daytime to go to a doctor’s appointment; and many women disliked having a male physician. The Dispensary also provided an opportunity for female medical students to gain practical experience. In addition to providing free care for poor women, it also provided a clean milk distribution system for sick babies, social services, a visiting nurse program and public baths.

The women who founded the Evening Dispensary were mainly graduates of the Women’s Medical College, both here in Baltimore and in Philadelphia. Contemporary accounts note that these early physicians were friends with the Suffragettes and were proponents of women on bicycles.

Name: Dispensary for Plaster of Paris Jackets & Free Day School  Founded: 1886

Whereas contemporary hospitals are generalists, taking care of any number of specialties, in the 1800’s, hospitals were quite specific, as you have seen. The Dispensary for Plaster of Paris Jackets and Free Day School is one of those.

This dispensary specifically cared for women and children suffering from diseases of the spine, including curvature and scoliosis. Plaster of Paris jackets were applied and then changed as the spine began to straighten. Miss Charlotte C. Barnwell, a wealthy spinster, applies the plaster jackets herself.

Because of their unwieldly plaster jackets, the children could not attend regular school. The children lived at home, but came to the clinic every day. The mornings were for white children and the afternoons were for black children. Students were taught bible instruction, sewing, drawing, singing, and physical exercises. Men were not admitted.

Name: Provident Hospital, Baltimore’s First Black Hospital         Founded: 1894

Provident Hospital and Free Dispensary was founded in 1894 at 419 Orchard Street, a neighborhood where several hospitals serving the white population were already located. At that time, admitting black patients to white hospitals was basically prohibited. Black patients still needed care and treatment, so a small group of doctors started Provident Hospital. 

The founders included Dr. William T. Carr, Sr. and Dr. J. Marcus Cargill. They wanted to provide an institution where people of color could be attended by physicians of their own race, and that colored physicians might have an opportunity to develop themselves in their specialties and become proficient in them. They also wanted to establish a well-organized training school for nurses. 

Among the early physicians at Provident were three Black physicians who were admitted as members of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in the 1880s, when the organization’s by-laws had changed members from “gentlemen” to “persons.” The first admitted was Whitfield Winsey, M.D. who became a pupil of Dr. John R.W. Dunbar, a professor of surgery at Washington University and received his medical degree from Harvard in 1877. Next was Reveredy M. Hall, M.D. a Baltimorean who graduated from Howard as a medical doctor in 1872 and was dean and director of Provident Hospital. The third was William H. Thompson, who was born in Yonkers, NY in 1849 and received his doctorate degree at Howard University in 1872.

The hospital soon outgrew its home on Orchard Street and in 1896, the hospital moved to 413 W. Biddle Street, where there was room for 30 beds and an adjoining building for the nurses’ training school.

Name: Maryland Lying-in and Foundling Hospital       Founded: 1887 
Name: Maternité Hospital                                                     Founded: 1895
Also: Women's Hospital for Medical & Surgical Treatment of Diseases Particular to Women

Most women gave birth at home, assisted by a mid-wife or a maid (think Gone with the Wind), and a physician was rarely in attendance, until the latter half of the 19th century.

In May of 1887, the Free Lying-In Hospital of the University of Maryland opened in Baltimore under the direction of Dr. George W. Miltenberger, who was President of the OB/GYN Society. 

The year that the Lying-In hospital opened, the only other hospitals for women in Baltimore were the Maryland Woman's Hospital (at 112 E. Saratoga St.) and the Maternite Lying-In-Asylum at 113 E. Lombard St., both associated with the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Part of the reason that medical schools opened hospitals was so that their students could learn by seeing patients, not just sitting in a classroom. 

In addition to the private maternity hospitals, the St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum also cared for “unfortunate women needing reformatory influences and the care of a lying-in hospital”.

Name: Hospital for Crippled & Deformed Children      Founded: 1896

Founded in 1895 by Dr. R. Tunstall Taylor, the Hospital for Crippled and Deformed Children was originally located at 6 West 20th Street. It was a free orthopaedic hospital for "crippled and deformed children." Two years later another house joined the hospital to form a complex.

Mr. James Lawrence Kernan was a theater owner, showman and philanthropist. After a visit to the hospital, he purchased Radnor Park estate in West Baltimore and deeded it to be the hospital. In 1911, after converting the mansion into a working hospital, the name was amended to The James Lawrence Kernan Hospital and Industrial School of Maryland for Crippled Children, Inc.

In 1996, Kernan's 100-year legacy of medical and surgical excellence combined with Montebello's nearly 40-year history of chronic disease care and rehabilitation to open as a rehabilitation center. It is now part of the University of Maryland Medical System.

Name: Franklin Square                            Founded: 1898

Franklin Square was an outgrowth of former National Temperance Hospital of Baltimore, located on the northwest corner of Calhoun and Fayette Streets. It was a general hospital for both private and free patients. There are 16 beds; board, $5 to $20 a week. Free patients must be approved by hospital committee. Dispensary attached. Treatment given to sick and injured of Maryland; free treatment, on condition that classes of Maryland Medical College may attend. The name means that cases are treated with as little use of alcoholic stimulants as possible. Management by the faculty of the Maryland Medical College.

In 1957, Franklin Square Hospital has purchased a 41 ½-acre site in Baltimore county for a proposed modern general hospital of approximately 300 beds. And in 1964,Franklin Square Hospital had moved to eastern Baltimore County soon to serve 165,000 people in Dundalk, Essex and Middle River area….

Name: Montebello/Sydenham Hospital for Communicable Diseases       Founded: 1922

The original Sydenham Hospital for Communicable Diseases, named for a physician who worked with children’s diseases, was constructed near Bay View Asylum in Baltimore and opened in 1909. Almost immediately the tiny 35-bed facility was deemed “fatally inadequate” for the needs of the city of 600,000.

By 1922, though, a new mayor agreed on plans by architect Edward Hughes Glidden for a nine-building campus in Montebello that could initially care for up to 140. The new campus was built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and opened in 1924. This facility was well equipped to treat many more contagious diseases, ranging from polio to infantile paralysis to whooping cough to typhoid, and it was situated in an idyllic location that would allow room for expansion.  

By 1949, the need for care for contagious diseases at Sydenham had dwindled but it was still being used to treat tuberculosis patients. In the 1950’s, the property was renamed and reopened as Montebello State Hospital in 1953, and nearly $3 million was spent on renovations and additions. Staffing shortages plagued the hospital in the 1960s due to uncompetitive salaries and it soon closed for good. Most of the buildings were demolished, although several are still being used by Morgan State University.

Name: Happy Hills Hospital                                        Founded: 1922

Founded by the 22-year old Hortense Miller Eliasberg as a graduate school project for children who had been in the hospital, but needed a healthy place to recuperate. Dr. William Welsh was President. The first location was a farm-house on Poplar Hill in North Roland Park. They’d outgrown the space by 1928 and relocated to Rogers Avenue, where they are now. In the 1950’s, the name was changed from Happy Hills to Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital.

Ironically, the earliest children came to Happy Hills because of malnourishment, but now they come because of obesity.

The Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital is the only jointly owned project of Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical System. When Mt. Washington celebrated its centennial in 2022, and I was commissioned to write the history of the hospital.

Name: Colonial Hospital                                      Founded: 1924

The Colonial Hospital was located at 1100 N. Mount Street, the site of the former homeopathic hospital, and the Morrow Hospital, a government hospital for the treatment of ex-servicemen.

The hospital was converted to serve 100 beds and opened June 1, 1923. There was a shortage of hospitals in the area, and Colonial Hospital would “aid materially in reducing congestion in local hospitals.” He also mentioned that there were waiting lists at all of the local hospitals.

An article in the Baltimore Sun mentioned that all of the hospital beds at Colonial Hospital would be moderately priced, or even free and that it would be a general hospital, and specialists would act as advisors. 

Dr. H.G. Rytina said that many hospitals only wanted to serve their small group of specialist physicians, while patients wanted to have their family physician care for them, even when they were in the hospital. They were having difficulty in getting their patients into hospitals unless they “turned them over” to a member of the hospital staff.

He argues that most general practitioners don't want to go beyond their depth. They don't want to do major surgery or handle complicated maternity cases. But there was no desire on the hospitals' part to open to all physicians with no regulation. Hospitals at that time, were either "closed" or "open" to outside physicians. 

Dr. Rytina argued that it was often the young and progressive physicians who were losing out because they were not being given the benefits of hospital practice, particularly for their own patients. Visiting physicians were usually caring for the hospitals' charity patients.

The hospital's name came from one of the larger buildings, which was in an imposing Colonial style of architecture. It was one of the three buildings on the campus.

Name: Taylor Manor Hospital                                       Founded: 1907

There is a hospital that's always been along the edge of my radar. 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. 

Directories

One of the resources that I used for this presentation is my office’s collection of Directories of Charitable and Beneficent Organizations, from 1877 to 1902. They are a fascinating source of information and the adverts in them are amazing.