Baltimore Begging

If Johns Hopkins, the Baltimore skinflint who founded Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins University, turned in his grave ten years ago when Johns Hopkins Hospital trustees asked the U. S. public for $4,550,000 for new buildings and $8,600,000 for additional endowment, then Johns Hopkins' bones must have had a conniption fit last week. For the trustees of Johns Hopkins Hospital were begging former patients to contribute $200,000 to prevent the financially strapped hospital from shutting a large number of its free wards and curtailing its free clinical services. The famed hospital, which takes medical care of 25% of Baltimore's charity cases, found that the interest and dividends on the securities of its endowment portfolio were not sufficient to run the institution full blast.

That was one situation that provident Johns Hopkins (1795-1873) tried to prevent, for overextending one's resources was something he never could abide. One of his favorite ways of making money was to buy up notes which people could not pay and then squeeze the debtors to the wall.

Johns Hopkins' father, a Quaker tobacco grower, freed his slaves in 1807, made his sons stop school and go to work on the family's Virginia plantation. At 24, young Hopkins went into business for himself. The first year he did $200,000 worth of business selling groceries and farm products, mostly in exchange for whiskey. Turning around, he sold the whiskey as "Hopkins' Best." For that commerce Quakers expelled him from their meeting but later took him back. He fell in love with a cousin. But her father, fearing effects of consanguinity, forbade the marriage. Neither sweetheart ever married.

Johns Hopkins endorsed business papers, bought overdue notes, became a banker, loaned money to the State of Maryland, the city of Baltimore, the Baltimore & Ohio R. R., became a most imperious gentleman. At one time he owned more stock in the B. & O. than any other human being. But he never traveled far from Baltimore. He walked whenever he could, never wore an overcoat, had difficulty sleeping.

On Christmas Day 1872, childless Johns Hopkins contemplated the end of his life and the division of his wealth. He had already written his will giving $3,500,000 to found Johns Hopkins Hospital and $3,500,000 to found Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. During the following Lent he addressed an imperious letter to twelve leading Baltimore men. In that letter he revealed the tender core of his heart. Wrote he: "The indigent sick of this city and its environs, without regard to sex, age, or color, who may require surgical or medical treatment, and who can be received into the Hospital without peril to the other inmates, and the poor of this city and State, of all races, who are stricken down by any casualty, shall be received into the Hospital, without charge, for such periods of time and under such regulations as you may prescribe. . . .

"You will also provide for the reception of a limited number of patients who are able to make compensation for the room and attention they may require. . . . It will be your special duty to secure the service of the Hospital surgeons and physicians of the highest character and greatest skill."

By next Christmas Day Johns Hopkins lay dead. His trustees at once took steps to realize the university and medical school which he anticipated. But his plans for Johns Hopkins Hospital were too vast for his residual estate. Trustees let the hospital's $3,500,000 fructify for 15 years and then when it was virtually doubled, started a 230-bed hospital with Johns Hopkins' Four Founding Doctors in charge: William Osler, William Stewart Halsted, Howard Atwood Kelly, William Henry Welch.

Subsequently Johns Hopkins Hospital organized affiliated institutions, while its medical reputation spread out across the land. Mrs. Harriet Lane Johnston of Washington financed a Children's Clinic; James Buchanan ("Diamond Jim") Brady of Manhattan, a Urological Institute; Mr. & Mrs. Henry Phipps of New York, a Psychiatric Clinic; Mrs. Lucy Wortham James of Manhattan, a Woman's Clinic; patients of Dr. William Holland Wilmer, an Eye Institute. Laboratories, a School of Hygiene & Public Health, a School for Nurses, a medical library, an Institute of the History of Medicine grew up to compose, with the Hospital and the Medical School, one of the greatest medical centres in the land. The remarkable hospital staff attracted other remarkable doctors. Its endowment grew to $7,300,000, the value of its land and buildings to $5,000,000. Today, with its 789 beds, it is generally recognized as the South's No. 1 hospital. Eighty percent of its private patients come from outside Baltimore. Fees from patients totaled $1,000,000 last year; endowment added $250,000, miscellaneous income, something over $100,000. But all such income will total $200,000 less than the $1,500,000 that Johns Hopkins needs to run full blast this year. Hence last week's cry for help.

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