Raising the bar: Mary Elizabeth Garrett, M. Carey Thomas, and The Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent) 2011;24(1):21–26 I n his defi nitive history on the early days of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Alan Chesney wrote of Mary Elizabeth Garrett as follows: “For to this lady, more than any other single person, save only Johns Hopkins himself, does the School of Medicine owe its being” (1). Strong words indeed, and doubly important because of the truth they convey. Most knowledgeable individuals are vaguely aware of the storyline here. Th e long-awaited opening of the medical school called for in Mr. Hopkins’ will had been delayed because of an economic downturn in the late 1880s, during which the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) railroad stock, which comprised much of the fi nancial underpinning of the school, had stopped paying dividends. Th e money to open the school simply wasn’t there. Th is provided the perfect opportunity for Mary Garrett and her determined band of friends—perhaps accomplices is a better term here—to ride to the rescue, while exacting concessions which some trustees, and especially Hopkins President Daniel Coit Gilman, considered to be harsh and unreasonable in the extreme. Who was Mary Elizabeth Garrett? Who were those able and determined friends who worked with her to accomplish their goals? What else did they accomplish in their lifetimes to set them apart from other women of their times? And, lest we think that this story dwells in the remote past and has no resonance in our modern era, consider that Mary Elizabeth Garrett garnered the third-highest vote in a recent Johns Hopkins poll to name the four “schools” in a proposed reorganization of the medical school curriculum. (Th ose names, incidentally, are to be Florence Sabin, Helen Taussig, Daniel Nathans, and Vivian Th omas.)