Add Your Memories Here. Contact Barbara Koehler at bmk@jhmi.edu

Some staff memories from the 40’s through the 60’s
From Stan Meyer, Reference, and Marjorie Petterson, Acquisitions Coordinator:

• The staff numbered about 30 people
• Library pages delivered the books from the stacks to the patrons
• The checkout desk was outside the ERR
• The WRR was faculty dining room and there was a steam table under the painting; in order for
  the library to be accredited, there needed to be more seating space – and so the WRR was
  born again in that space
• The maintenance staff washed the skylights
• Nancy’s office was the photography room where prints were developed; it was also once the acquisitions office
• The current Ladies room was once the men’s smoking room
• Lyndie’s office was the staff lounge – it had a gas range with 8 burners and 2 ovens, a sink and a refrigerator
• The basement was all stacks
• Smoking and eating were allowed and 150 firemen once reacted to a cigarette left burning in the stacks
• Milton Eisenhower promised to air condition the library before he left Hopkins – there were lots of fans in the library
• Fortuny silk draperies hung in the main reference area and blew all over when the windows were open
• Near the library stood St. Andrews Church, the State Theater, a Little Tavern restaurant and a Reads Drugstore – it was a nice shopping area
• The Reserve Collection held 4 books with colored yarn around their spines to identify them
• The tapestries were the gift of the Halsted family
• Augusta Tucker came in to Welch often (she was the author of Miss Susie Slagles)
• Dr. Larkey’s (40’s) birthday was May 8 and the staff always got him a cake from Hutzler’s (an old Baltimore department store.) A staff member was dispatched in a taxi to pick it up. It was either a white cake with white icing decorated with tiny flowers or Hutzler’s famous Wellesley fudge cake – a square chocolate cake.
• Sometimes the women working on the famous indexing project had a picnic at Sherwood Gardens and sat on the grass eating. A kinder, gentler time!

Memories from John B. De Hoff, M.D.,
Class of 1939, medical student 1935-39:

“Sanford Larkey gave me the task of checking books on shelves in the top floor history stacks against cards in the index drawers…[he] gave me the room on the first floor, at the far western end, where a Welch collection was housed…This was a quiet room…and made for drowsy work…When really tired I would get the key to the Great Hall [West Reading Room] … and take advantage of the seven-foot couch there and sleep for a couple of hours. This room was hardly ever used by anyone else, not even for small galas – which were few. The other sleeping area was the small Nurses’ Library, in the northwest corner of one of the stacks, the fifth level…but the sofa was love-seat size and not as comfortable…I purchased a bicycle from a store up on Broadway to ride to and fro…I stored the bike in a back room on the east side, where the catalogers were located. It was pleasant to coast all the way from Sears’ store at North and Harford down to Greenmount, ‘no hands’ all the way. Studying at Welch, using their texts and their carrels, made it needless to take books back and forth from home, and made bicycle traffic feasible. In winter, I’d catch the 10 PM or so Number 13 trolley and read or doze or wish the economy would let the electric transit company provide more heat in these older cars.

I kept a loose count of passenger car totals in trains bound for New York, as seen from the stacks, and noted that as business improved, and as the Depression lifted, the number of passenger cars increased from five or seven to eleven or even thirteen.

I was…married secretly in 1938. Audrey would occasionally come over from her work at the Safe Deposit and Trust Company, have dinner with me for 55 cents or 65 cents, and then read while I studied in Welch’s Reading Room…Welch was a major part of my medical education…”

From Dr. Victor McKusick:

“I arrived in Baltimore, never having been south of New York before, on Washington’s birthday 1943, to start medical school on March 1. … The Welch Medical Library was only 13 ½ years old at that time. Dr. Welch had died nine years previously in 1934; the last of Sargent’s four doctors, Howard A. Kelly died in 1941; Henry Siegrist was the acting director of the library, because Sanford Larkey was away on government duty related to the War….Siegrist instructed us in the use of the library.

The open stacks was something I had not experienced before and was a tremendous delight…I haunted the Welch Library as a student and as a resident, establishing a pattern that continued through at least the first half of my stay here at Johns Hopkins. An advocation [sic] beginning in my medical school days that led me to the library was an interest in illnesses of the great and near great. …

My first published piece of clinical investigation was…in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 1949…we pointed out that Jonathan Hutchinson (1828-1913) had first described [Peutz-Jeghers syndrome] in 1896…The Archives of Surgery to which Hutchinson was essentially the only contributor was published in 11 volumes 1890-1900. The Welch Library had the complete set… Herbert Hutchinson stated that his father’s clinical museum, a collection of watercolors, drawings and other illustrations, had been purchased after Hutchinson’s death…by Sir William Osler…and shipped to the Johns Hopkins Medical School. …inquiry found that in the lowest level of the library there were six large wooden packing pieces containing the material. These had come to Baltimore …in 1914 or 15 because they were wrapped in British war bond promotional posters….For the next two years much of my spare time was occupied going through this collection…This was the basis of a clinical biography of Hutchinson published in 1952…

…I went into cardiology…This led to the publication of …Cardiovascular Sound in Health and Disease (1958)… 1,607 references in its bibliography illustrates what I had done in connection with other projects that involved the Welch Medical Library.

…MIM, as we call Mendelian Inheritance in Man, has required from the beginning extensive bibliographic work, based as it is on the periodical biomedical literature, especially the refereed literature. …In 1984,…Nina Matheson, came as director of the Welch Medical Library. She knew MIM in its computerized form from her work at the National Library of Medicine and her work on the use of computers in medical schools and she came up with the brilliant idea of putting MIM online…That she and Dick Lucier did – under the designation OMIM (online MIM) also a brilliant invention of theirs.

…In September, 1987 we went public with OMIM from the Welch Medical Library with funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute …

I no longer haunt the reading rooms and stacks of the Welch Library searching for material for incorporation in OMIM. …In the …years that I have been associated with the Welch Medical Library, I have seen its evolution into the computer age and I like what I have seen.”

From Philip R. Slavney, MD
Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine
 
Welch was what a library should look like - solid, repository of knowledge.  I immediately felt at home in the library.  Today, logging onto the web site is a very powerful tool - the library is at your fingertips.  I'm at the library every day from my desk.
 
From Barton Childs, MD
Professor Emeritus, Pediatrics
 
I came to Hopkins in 1938 as a first year medical student.  Dr Larkey (Welch Director) met with all of the incoming students in small groups.  I recall that the students used the library frequently - the East Reading Room was jammed with students.  Service was very personalized - I felt like the library was mine to use.

From Edward R. Laws, Jr., M.D.,
Professor of Neurosurgery and Medicine, University of Virginia:

“The Welch Library is of particular interest in my own history, because my wife and I had our wedding reception in the library, a portion of which at one time was the Faculty Club for the Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine. The institution therefore contains both wonderful scientific memories and others of a more personal nature.”

Inscription above the fireplace in the Great Hall, 1929

“For books are not Absolutely dead Things,
But do contain a Potency of Life in them to be
As active as that Soul was Whose progeny they are;
Nay they do preserve, As in a Vial,
The purest Efficacy AND Extraction of
That living Intellect That bred them”

- John Milton,
Areopagitica