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. 

   

President's Day

As we all know, George Washington was the first President of our country. He served from April 30, 1789 to March 4, 1797. President Washington died on December 14, 1799, not quite a year after the founding of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland was established by the legislature in Annapolis. 

When Washington died, there were several physicians attended him, two of whom were Gustavus Brown!

Did you know that we have two Dr. Gustavus Richard Browns who were among our 101 Founders? One lived in Charles County, and the other in St. Mary’s County. They are clearly related, but the question is how.

For clarity, we are going to refer to them as GRB2 and GRB3, and the original Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown as GRB1.

Here’s what the Medical Annals of Maryland, and its editor, Eugene F. Cordell has to say:

Dr. GRB1 was born in Scotland in 1689 and immigrated to Maryland in 1708. In 1734, he purchased “Rich Hill” near Port Tobacco in Charles County. He had 12 children by his first wife, including three boys named Gustavus Richard Brown, all of whom died in their first year of life. When his first wife died, Dr. Brown remarried, and had two more children, one of whom was Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown (GRB2). He also operated a de facto medical school at Rich Hill and two of his students eventually became his sons-in-law. He died in 1755.

Dr. GRB2 was born in Charles County in 1747, and studied medicine at Edinburgh in 1768. While returning to Maryland, GRB1 spent time in the Medeira Islands where he collected numerous botanical specemins for his gardens at his home, Rose Hill. He was married and had four children, two of whom were named Gustavus and Gustavus Richard (!). In 1776, along with one of his nephews, he established an innocumation hospital, which he advertised in the portions of Maryland and Virginia along the Potomac River.

When President George Washington was on his deathbed, Dr. GRB2 was called to his side. He arrived from Maryland a scant seven hours before Washington’s death on December 14, 1799, and too late be be of any use. 

Washington at his Last Illness, with Drs. Craik and Brown. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

In a letter after Washington’s death, “he acknowledges that they were wrong in bleeding Washington so much.” GRB2 died at age 56 at his house, Rose Hill in 1804.

After much reading and digging over several years, I finally discovered that Dr. GRB3 was the son of GRB2’s brother, the Rev. Richard Brown, and was older than his uncle, GRB2. GRB3 was born in Scotland in 1744, and eventually came to St. Mary’s County, MD after studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1770. Dr. GRB3 received a summons on the night of December 13, 1799 to attend to President Washington, but by the time he arrived on the Maryland shore of the Potomac River, he received word that the President had already died.

Dr. GRB3 practiced medicine in St. Mary’s County for many years and eventually married the widow of one his patients, a Dr. Ireland, who was very wealthy and owned a property called “Summerseat.” He died there on July 3, 1801.

 Sources:    Medical Annals of Maryland, 1904. Edited by Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell, M.D. 

The Doctors Gustavus Brown of Lower Maryland. 1902. By Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell, M.D.

Marcia Crocker Noyes: The Librarian Who Never Left

I am so pleased to announce the publication of "Marcia Crocker Noyes: The Librarian Who Never Left," a biography of our librarian of 50 years.

Marcia was hired by Dr. William Osler in 1896 to be the first trained librarian for the Faculty, as it was then known. She was required to live and work on the premises, so that if a physician needed a book in the middle of the night, she could get it out of the stacks.

When we built our current building in 1909, she was highly involved in the design of it, as it was also to become her home. Marcia died in 1946 and her funeral was held in Osler Hall, a fitting testimony to her long friendship with Dr. Osler.

Of course, we've all heard stories about how she's never left the building. In fact, in her latter years, she mentioned that she would stay away for a few days, and then come back to haint (haunt) the building. And indeed, she has!

The book is available in two formats: an 80-page soft-cover edition for $30.00, and a digital format for $5.00. The funds raised by the sale of the book will be used to support the MedChi archives. 

To purchase the book in either format, either scan or click the QR code below. 

I hope that you will enjoy reading the book as much as I did researching and writing it!

1215-1217 Cathedral Street

I recently found out that MedChi once owned the two buildings directly to the north of our 1909 building, 1215 and 1217 Cathedral Street.

The School 49 building is on the right and 1215-1217 is to the left. 

In 1935, the owner of the two properties died, and in 1936, the Faculty, as it was then known, bought the two for $6,500, or $862,000 in today's money. The plan was to expand the Faculty's building and relocate the Board of Medical Examiners and the Committee on Careers in Nursing to the building. 

At the semi-annual House of Delegates meeting, the members were encouraged to visit the new buildings, and check the display of bookplates (some of which are now displayed in our Museum).

On the left side of the image, you can see a "white" house that looks like two joined houses, which would have been 1215 and 1217.

During the 1950's, plans were to demolish the two buildings and build a three-story building as an annex to the 1909 building.

But at the semi-annual House of Delegates meeting in April of 1960, that plan was dropped and a new plan was formulated to renovate and upgrade the original building, including adding an elevator, air conditioning and new seating for Osler Hall. 

This may have been the period in which all of the decorative elements from Osler Hall were removed and the Hall was stripped to Mid Century Modern blandness. (Details here)

Osler Hall, Circa 1962

At some point in the early 1960s, the buildings were demolished.

1961 and the adjacent buildings have been demolished.  Cathedral Street is one-way, southbound.

Plans to build a parking lot there to supplement the parking on the Maryland Avenue side. Half of the current lot was the playground for the adjacent School #49. 

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.  

Another Mystery Solved

In our beautiful Krause Room, there are four busts that look down from the trim that surrounds the room and tops the bookcases. They are about ten feet off the ground, and are a bit difficult to see.

But half of that mystery was recently solved, when searching through an 1899 Maryland Medical Journal article about MedChi’s history. In the article, there was an engraving of a bronze bust with the caption as follows: Engraved from bronze bust in possession of Medical & Chirurgical Faculty. Nathan R. Smith, MD of Baltimore, 1797-1877.

Dr. Smith lived in Baltimore and was selected to become the chair of surgery at the University of Maryland in 1827, commencing an eventful, 50-year career. Considered a bold and skillful operator, Smith was known to his students as “The Emperor.” His removal of a goiter from a patient was the first procedure of its kind in Maryland and only the second thyroidectomy in the country. 

Something about the engraving in the article seemed familiar, so I went to the Krause Room to take close-up images of the busts. Once I spent a few minutes comparing the actual bronze to the engraving of the bronze, I realized that that they were the same person: Nathan Ryno Smith, MD. Interestingly, it looks like there are two small repairs on the bust, one on the top of his head and a smaller one on his clavicle.

As I continued to read the article, I realized another image showed the second of the four busts!

It is John D. Buckler, MD (1785-1866) and again, it’s an engraving from a bust in our collection.

He graduated from the University of Maryland in 1817 and was an adjunct professor of anatomy there, as well. This one was a bit easier because the hairstyles are so similar. 

Two down. Two to go!