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Page 5 text:
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§§11 ' ‘-TV TERRA MARIAE MEDICUS UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND SCHOOL OF MEDICINE BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 1976 1
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Page 6 text:
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A Look Back Amos. Curtis. Jones. O’Connor. Snyder. Our earliest predecessors. The Class of 1812. The first graduates of The Medical College of Maryland, shortly to be known as The University of Maryland, College of Physick. Their medical education had been somewhat lacking in the usual ameni- ties. Commencing in the face of a hostile mob which demol- ished their first school building in a fit of righteous indigna- tion over human dissection , they were lectured for the rest of the first term of four months in the homes of the professors. They met variously for the rest of their medical school career in a borrowed ballroom and an abandoned schoolhouse on Fayette Street, where the professors had to shovel snow from the floor in the morning, chase rats from the cadavers and defrost the chemical apparatus with hot water . It seems quite a lot to endure to attain a profession which, in those days, except for a few noted academicians, promised neither mon- etary reward nor prestige . The history of the sixth medical school in the United States , like that of most human institutions , is a catalogue of good times and bad , periods of eminence and periods of near disgrace. From first to last, however, it seems to have func- tioned in a solid yeoman manner, providing competent clin- ical practitioners to the state of Maryland, with an occa- sional brilliant medical innovator appearing. Any history of the University of Maryland School of Medi- cine must begin with the Father of the University , as he came to be called, John Beale Davidge. Born in Annapolis, Davidge received his M.D. from Scotland ' s Glasgow Univer- sity, it being less expensive than the prestigious University of Edinburgh where he first matriculated . He came to Baltimore in 1797 and began offering lectures in midwifery as early as 1802. Together with James Cocke of Virginia, educated in London and Philadelphia, and James Shaw, a romantic ide- alist, poet and Naval surgeon, who had attended medical lectures all over the world without receiving an M . D . , Davidge built a two-story brick building behind his house on Saratoga Street in 1807. Lectures in anatomy, physiology and chemistry began there in November. In less than three weeks, an angry mob destroyed the new building and carried the lone cadaver through the streets, finally depositing the grisly relic on Davidge’s doorstep. This was an uncomfort- ably similar replay of the fate of the short-lived medical school begun by Dr. Andrew Wiesenthal in 1788, but the atmosphere had become slightly more tolerant in the inter- vening years and , less than a month after the Saratoga Street raid, the Maryland General Assembly approved a charter incorporating the College of Medicine of Maryland. It was chartered as a proprietary, profit-making school, giving the professors the right to own property, charge student fees and grant degrees. Joining Davidge, Cocke and Shaw for this enterprise were Nathaniel Potter, teaching theory and prac- tice of medicine, and Richard Wilmot Hall, lecturing in obstetrics, whose temporary position on the faculty lasted for forty years. Two years later, Samuel Baker filled the school’s vacant chair of pharmacy. The first several years of the little school, as previously mentioned, passed in step-child facilities. But as that first class of 1812 graduated, construction had begun on a perma- nent building situated on the corner of Lombard and Greene Streets on a lot sold to the physicians by Col. John Eager Howard at discount. In 1811, a lottery drew $18,000 for the proposed edifice, which was designed by Robert Carey Long to resemble the Roman Pantheon. Classes began in the unfin- ished building in the fall of 1812 and the school changed its name to the University of Maryland . Between 1812 and 1826, the school enjoyed increasing prosperity . Students from every part of the country filled the classrooms. Only Pennsylvania School of Medicine turned out larger graduating classes. The core faculty of Davidge, Pot- ter, DeButts, Baker and Hall was joined temporarily by some of the greatest medical minds of the day , attracted by the new facilities and progressive atmosphere. One of these was Joyn Crawford, who lectured at Maryland between 1811 and 1813: Crawford was a brilliant theoretician who seems to have anticipated both Pasteur and Darwin, propounding a germ theory and a theory of evolution. Crawford was not universally admired and there were those who said his wife did the University a bigger service than he did, selling his medical library to the school after he died in 1813 . Even without the visiting faculty, the College of Medicine would 2
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