A Map of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Circa 1950

I was at a country auction this weekend and one of the items that came up for bid was an old "map" of Johns Hopkins Hospital by the cartoonist, Richard Q. "Moco" Yardley. The Moco comes from his old nickname, a play on Eskimo.

Yardley drew a number of these fun maps. I know of ones for Baltimore County, the Eastern Shore, Anne Arundel County, and of course, Baltimore City, which was done for the Orioles. Yardley was the Sun's cartoonist from 1939 to 1969 and did mostly editorial cartoons. 

Yardley's maps are very detailed and have a lot of little "inside" jokes in them. Readers must remember that they were drawn in the 1950's and things that were common then, can be offensive to some today. With that said, here's the map I found.

The map references Osler, Halsted and Walsh, but Kelly is missing. You can see the Phipps and Wilmer Clinics and the main building. And as in all of Yardley's cartoons, there is a little rendering of him, which looks nothing at all like he did in real life!

Marble Art

I was scanning the Morgan Library's fabulous Instagram feed when I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. The photographer, Abelardo Morrell, who was at one time, a security guard at the Morgan, took pictures of all of the inside covers of Henry David Thoreau's journals.

He put them in order from first to last to create a huge collage of the beautiful marbleized end papers. 

You can read about the project in the New York Times, here. And here it is in place at the Morgan.

I thought it would be a fun idea to create a similar project for an item at our upcoming Silent Auction, in honor of the inauguration of Gary Pushkin, MD in October. 

We have loads of books with marbleized end papers, so there's no shortage of patterns that we can use. 

 Stay tuned for the final project.

Bringing the Past to Life

When we look at all of the old black and white photos in our collections, they seem so flat and lifeless, even if they include lots of people. In our minds, these aren't real people, because they don't look like the people we see every day. 

But when you add color to the image, it instantly comes to life. I am the resident photoshop wizard, so have played around with colorizing some of our images here. 

The first picture I did was our Marcia Crocker Noyes. As you might know, we like to pose Marcia for the holidays. But when you've got a black and white Marcia on a bright sunny beach, it doesn't look right. So, she needed to be colorized. 

I went down to the Krause Room and tried to channel Marcia, so I could figure out what colors her dress and cape were. I had to guess on some things, but overall, I am pretty happy with the result.

Next up was one of MedChi's early headquarters buildings. This was a lot more of a challenge, as it was on the second floor of the Emerald Hotel on Calvert Street. There were tons of advertisements, windows, brickwork and other details, so it was a perfect job for that odd not-quite-holiday day.

Finally, I played around with a group of physicians from the late 1800's. They're a dour bunch, clearly posing for the camera. I am not sure if that's a room at an early HQ building of ours, or a backdrop set. 

Half of this picture is in color, so you can see the contrast.

And here's the fully colorized version. 

I looked at old advertisements for men's clothing in the late 1800's to come up with the color. I picked hair and eye colors based on closely looking at each of the men and making educated guesses. I have portraits of Drs. Chew and Donaldson, but Chew's hair is white, and Donaldson's hair is a close approximation to this. 

I realize that there are a lot of people who hate the idea of colorizing images, but it's not like the original people or places were in black and white. We are just giving them life again. 

Yikes!

I am going through all sorts of old files in order to cull those that are important, and chuck out those that have no relevance (like the one on painting the interior of the building).

The files contain all sorts of correspondence, some pieces more interesting than others. I came across this letter from the editor of the Baltimore Sun, dated sometime last century, and thought it was equally funny and horrifying!

Take a look.

It is pretty impossible to think that a contemporary editor would ever send a letter or email like this to a reader.

Indexing the MMJ

We’re in the process of working with the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Health Sciences & Human Services Library to digitize the Maryland Medical Journal. It’s a massive project, and will take some time.

Before that happens, I’ve scanned in the tables of contents from several decades of the MMJ. I frequently get requests to find specific articles and references, often with the most vague specifications, such as “it was an article that appeared sometime in the 1980s”, which is literally no help at all.

Now, I can just look through the tables of contents and find the article that I need. For some of the older MMJ issues, I have scanned the indices, because they didn’t contain tables of contents.

The order in which I’ve scanned the Journals is somewhat random, mainly because I was looking for something else, so just scanned in a year here and another year there. Right now, I can just flip through the tables of contents and indices and see if I can find what I need, rather than pulling out all of the books.

It’s our hope that by the end of 2016, several decades of the Maryland Medical Journal will be digitized. Here’s just a peek at one year. Click here.

Maryland Medical Journal’s Ads, Circa 1899

I love looking at the old advertisements in the early Maryland Medical Journals both for their content and for their design. It’s funny how shocking some of them seem now. Ads for cocaine and heroin as well as numerous alcoholic preparations abound!

Here are some that caught my eye.

Malt Nutrine by Anheuser Busch… Also known as liquid bread, or beer!

Pepto Mangan Gude – helped stimulate the appetite and build red blood cells.

Cocaine. Nice to know it’s pure.

Beer & Rye Whiskey

The design on these is really amazing, especially when you realize they’re engraved at size.

Antiseptics are new to the field in the 1890’s.

It’s fun to imagine the physicians going through the city in their phaetons.

He can’t wait until he can chase her again!

Lots of ads for drunks and inebriates

Chattolanee Water… Greenspring Valley

Most of the bound sets of journals have the advertisements removed, so it was fun to find a full set of unbound Maryland Medical Journals.

The New Music Hall

Now, I know that you’re thinking, why is she talking about a music hall when this is a medical archives blog, but stick with me for a moment. When I was searching the pre-1900 Maryland Medical Journals, I came across an advertisement for the AMA Conference which was being held in Baltimore in 1895. It advertised the event as taking place in the New Music Hall, and was illustrated with this sketch.

Hmmm, I thought, that looks vaguely familiar, especially the tower in the background. So, I dropped the picture onto Facebook and let others do the research for me.

Within minutes, I had some answers. This building is currently the Lyric Theatre, and the tower in the background is the tower at Mount Royal Station. Apparently, the rounded section was never built, but if you look at the lines of the building, you can see the Lyric before the most recent renovations.

From my architect friend Eric, came this explanatory sketch.

Although the angle is wrong, this is from the corner of Maryland & Mount Royal, you can see the vestiges of the original building.

And this picture was posted, where you can see the end section with the columned façade, but without the rounded portion.

The advertisements for the AMA meeting were posted in the April 1895 MMJ, and the meeting was to take place in May of that year. So while they were advertising the meeting in the rounded building, it didn’t actually exist.

Nor, apparently, did this building. Amazing this building DID exist!

This sketch, from the Architectural Review, really makes it look like a stunning building. It is right around the corner, literally, from our current offices, but we didn’t build the building until 1909.

Here’s a section of an 1897 map that shows the Music Hall and the Exhibition Hall from the Bromley 1896 Map of Baltimore. I’ve added names to clearly show the streets, and noted where MedChi is now located. (It was a wagon works!)

Any thoughts or suggestions on these buildings are much appreciated!

#ColorOurCollections

Taking advantage of the the new craze of coloring books for adults, the New York Academy of Medicine has organized a #colorourcollections fest! They have asked other organizations to participate in this, and we thought we’d like to be part of the crowd.

I’ve selected some old bills and receipts from long-gone Baltimore businesses for the first few pages. If you right click the images, you can open them in a new tab, or save and print them.

The American Iron Building, later the Baltimore News-American building.

George O. Stevens, maybe have been a food purveyor

Dog

Excelsior

And here’s one of our historic buildings.

Thanks for playing along with more than 125 other cultural organizations around the world!

Construction Photographs, Circa 1909

As I was hunting for some evidence of when MedChi first publicized our phone number, I came across two photographs of the construction of the 1909 building. They were taken in October,

and November of 1908.

The notes say that from beginning to end, the construction only took seven months! Pretty incredible.
Dr. G. Milton Linthicum, the Chair of the building committee had this to say about the construction.

At the time this was written, the library, then located at the premises on Eutaw Street, just a few blocks away, only had about 7,000 volumes. So the projection of an eventual 63,000 volumes was very ambitious. The highest number of books, journals, etc. recorded was 65,000.
In another little piece, I found this nugget of information.

Here’s the first picture of the light and airy reading room, suitably decorated.

Not too different! A few coats of paint, some book cases and a carpet added and you’ve got the present day Krause Room.