University of Maryland School of Medicine - Terrae Mariae Medicus (Baltimore, MD)

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annecdotes and flashes of rhetoric by heart, nevertheless, according to a student of that time, poetic flourishes could sometimes be rewarded. Professor Wm. T. Howard had one about feeling the pulse of the morning dew that students greeted with wild applause no matter how often they heard it. Reform came with the formation of the American Medical Colleges Association which set standard for admission and expanded courses to three years, specifying a different cur- riculum each year. By 1903, with steadily rising require- ments, the Association was able to send out inspectors to guarantee cooperation of the member schools. The Univer- sity managed to keep ahead of the requirements, but was unprepared for the Flexner Report of 1910 which recom- mended the abolishment of all proprietary schools. Abraham Flexner, a Johns Hopkins professor, particularly opposed the profit system in medical education and Maryland, as the founder and most successful exponent of such institutions, seems to have been a special target. He recommended that it be closed unless its professors could be placed on a full-time salary basis. The faculty had stopped selling lecture tickets to the students in 1905, but collected all the fees into a cen- tral fund from which they drew their salaries. According to Flexner , this was still proprietary education , devious at that . The faculty finally turned to the Maryland General Assembly for funding, threatening to close the school if they didn ' t get it. The legislators came forth with just enough funding over the years to keep the school accredited and just short of bankruptcy. This effectively did away with any chance of profits and proprietary education slowly faded away. In 1913, the AMA, whose Council on Medical Education had taken over the authority of the American Medical Col- leges Association, informed the Baltimore Medical College and the University of Maryland that they would have to merge or both be shut down. In 1915 the same merger was ordered by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. By the first merger, the University acquired Maryland General for clinical teaching; by the second merger, Mercy Hospital came under its teaching program. Maryland was again the only medical college in the state, except for the Hopkins. Carried along with the rise of standard at the University - including an entrance exam in 1891, a fourth year of courses in 1895 , and an admission requirement of a high school dip- loma in 1905 - the students launched their own reform of sorts. In the 1890 ' s they started wearing coats and ties to class. Eighteen hundred and ninty-five saw the formation of a combined Medical-Dental football team complete with cheers: Rif! Raf! Ruf! Rif! Raf! Ruf! University of Maryland Is pretty hot stuff ! In an outbreak of school spirit, various clubs sprang up. Two of the most notorious of these were the Gourmandizers, with the motto, two beers and a gorge , and the 700 Club, devoted to pursuing all forms of sin. The University Centennial celebration of 1907 saw the Bal- timore schools merged with St. John ' s College in an attempt to graft a school of arts and sciences on the University trunk. Despite high expectation, this was an ill-fated union which soon dissolved. Further attempts at merger with an under- graduate school were postponed until after World War I, when pressure from the AMA, now determined to kill off proprie- tary education for good, and the increasing burden of debts forced the Baltimore schools to look for a new partner. After rejection by St. John ' s and Western Maryland, they found that partner in College Park at the Maryland State College. That merger in 1920 laid the foundation for the present Uni- versity of Maryland. It had been 113 years since Davidge began the Medical College of Maryland and in that time the Old School had graduated thousands of physicians to serve the state. A new era of modern professional education had begun . Su Willard Sources: 1. Callcott, G.H., A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MARY- LAND 2. Ballard, M. B. , A UNIVERSITY IS BORN 3. WHEN HOPKINS CAME TO BALTIMORE. 5

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New University Hospital Building. the so-called Golden Age. Extramurally , the professors of the still-proprietary school were considered monopolistic money-grubbers and godless grave robbers. Intramurally , the school suffered from lack of true leadership inherent in the system- of essentially independent entrepreneurs. The final blow to autonomy came when a brilliant U. of Md. graduate, Horatio Gates Jamison, having failed to attain an appointment at the school, attempted to establish a rival medical college. His charter was rejected, but the state committee during that investigation found the University charter to be radically defective. The conclusion of the committee was that the state should assume control by a board of trustees none of whom should be professors or have any personal interest to be affected. On March 6, 1826, University of Maryland became a state university in fact. As might be expected , the medical faculty chafed under this new arrangement. Pattison sailed off to England, notify- ing no one, never to return. Davidge, DeButts and Baker all died within three years of the trustees taking control. Their replacements, attracted on the basis of the school ' s previous reputation, all left within ten years. A further blow to the school occurred in 1827, when Jamison established Washing- ton Medical College of Baltimore with lower fees and easier attainment of the M.D. degree as lures to draw off prospec- tive Maryland students. After an uneasy decade of falling income and enrollment, a confrontation over who was to be professor of anatomy in 1837, led to a takeover of University buildings by the faculty and trusted students. They were eventually forced to evacu- ate, but formed a government exile, holding classes of their own in the Old Indian Queen Hotel and the Presbyterian Church on Hanover Street. The trustees, meanwhile, recruited a group of second-rate Baltimore physicans which kept the hospital in operation and held classes in the University buildings. With Jamison’s Washington Medical College, there were now three medical schools in Baltimore. The fight over control of the school continued in the courts. In 1837, the Baltimore court ruled for the trustees, but in 1839, the Court of Appeals ruled for the faculty. On April 3, 1839, the General Assembly repealed the Act of 1826 and ordered the trustees to restore all the property to the faculty. The University was once more a proprietary school. It was in some ways a Pyrrhic victory. The faculty attempted to clean house, organizing new committees, drawing up bylaws and plans for monthly faculty meetings. But the hospital was losing about $1000 per year and they were forced to dismiss the janitor to save his $250 annual sal- ary. Each professor then became literally responsible for cleaning a portion of the hospital. But enrollment increased to 200 students by 1846 with 65 graduates a year. New faculty were recruited with a different approach to medicine - a return to the practical rather than the theoretical. Nathan Ryno Smith was the outstanding professor of the era. The most brilliant and respected surgeon of the state, he was called the Emperor by awe-struck students, partly inspired, no doubt, by the teaching stick he snapped against his trousers like a field marshall ' s baton. By the end of the 1840 ' s, the school had recovered a bit of its former eminence. New courses were instituted in auscultation, pediatrics, pathology, histology and microscopy - Maryland was probably the first school to institute microscopy as a course. The faculty-edited Maryland Medical and Surgical Journal became the official publication of the U.S. Army and Navy and, in 1848, the University played host to the first annual meeting of the American Medical Association. Wash- ington Medical College, unable to meet the competition, closed in 1851 and U. of Md. was once again the state ' s only medical school . During the U.S. Civil War, the University was a strong Southern sympathizer, sometimes approaching treason. Each year, the professors of the medical college refused to fly the U.S. flag at commencement, and each year Union troops forced them to do so . In 1862 , when the graduating class had only two union sympathizers (who were duly hissed at gradua- tion), the president of the class was the one gallant Virginia gentleman remaining at the school. Southern sympathy didn’t prevent the school from making a profit off Uncle Sam, charging the government five dollars a week for hospi- talizing wounded soldiers when the usual patient rate was three dollars a week. After the war, and before the Flexner Report of 1910, the quality of medical education all over the country deterio- rated. Diploma mills, promising easy degrees, flourished uncontrolled by state licensing bodies. Baltimore was full of them - Baltimore Medical College, billing itself as anti- Darwin and Christian was established in 1881; Atlantic Medical College was begun in 1890 by three professors who had failed to obtain licenses; Maryland Medical College, established in 1898, sold degrees to students who had been rejected everywhere else. There were other schools, how- ever, which served a legitimate purpose - because of racial and sexual discrimination, the Women ' s Medical College of Maryland (1882) and the Maryland Medico- Chirurgical and Theological College of Christ ' s Institution (1900) for Blacks met an otherwise unfilled need. Another medical school established during this period presented a different kind of competition for the Old School, as the University of Mary- land was known by then: The Johns Hopkins School of Medi- cine took in its first class in 1893, effectively removing the last semblance of leadership from U. of Md., but pointing the way for true scientific medicine. Standards at the University during this time weren ' t much higher than the diplomas mills. In 1890, a boy could come to the medical school after less than one year of high school and graduate after two terms of less than six months each. The lectures apparently were often somewhat less than stimulat- ing - one old professor had to lock his class in to assure attendance at his lectures. Since the second year students had heard all the lectures the year before, they knew all the 4

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This yearbook is dedicated to those faculty members below who through their enthusiasm for teaching and their sincere interest in us were given teaching awards by our class. They include: Frances P. Schulter, Ph.D. , Marshall L. Rennels, Ph.D. , Marvin P. Rozear, M.D. , Rosslyn W. I. Kessel, Ph.D., William Holden, M.D., Theodore E. Woodward, M.D., John N. Diaconis, M.D. , and Ellen R. Wald, M.D. We would also like to express our appreciation to those whose names are not mentioned , but who also gave much of themselves to further our education. Class of 1976 6