Read more about the building that is on the National Register of Historic Places in the latest issue of “CATALYST.”
When the College of Medicine of Maryland was founded in 1807, its founders, John Beale Davidge, James Cocke, James Shaw, Thomas E. Bond, William Donaldson, and Nathaniel Potter, taught students in their homes and rented spaces throughout the city of Baltimore. As years went by, the need for a permanent home for the school was acutely felt, but there were no acceptable buildings available to the faculty, so they had to finance and build one.
Col. John Eager Howard sold a lot on the rolling hills on the western outskirts of Baltimore to the faculty for $10,000. The faculty hired local carpenter-turned-architect Robert Carey Long Sr. to design the building. Long used the Pantheon in Rome as inspiration and designed the building specifically for the medical needs of the school, including secluded entrances for deliveries of cadavers. Public opinion was against the use of human bodies for anatomical study; early on, Dr. Davidge’s own property was destroyed by angry Baltimoreans because he was teaching dissection. The medical faculty believed dissection was necessary and the building design had to make it possible to bring cadavers into the building and protect all involved in the teaching of dissection.
With plans in place, the cornerstone was laid April 7, 1811. By October 1812, use of some rooms in the building began, but construction continued until October 1813. The final cost was between $35,000 and $40,000. The building, known as the Medical Building or College, was large for its day, measuring 64 feet by 90 feet. When it opened, it had an unimpeded view of the Patapsco River.
The building was impressive but not without its idiosyncrasies; there was no electricity, no central heating or cooling, and no plumbing. It was common for the building to smell from oil burning lamps, smoke from wood-burning stoves, chemicals from chemistry experiments, and embalming or decay from cadavers and dissection. Anatomical Hall, the main lecture space, had acoustic problems requiring professors to stand dead center because any movement caused students to not hear the lecture. Additionally, students in Anatomical Hall could stand on opposite sides at the top of the amphitheater and hold conversations without others hearing.
In 1812, the College of Medicine of Maryland was rechartered as the University of Maryland by the legislature in Annapolis. In 1815, the library opened on the first floor of the Medical Building, housing books purchased from the estate of Dr. John Crawford. On Oct. 9, 1824, the faculty of the school bestowed an honorary degree of LLD on the Marquis de Lafayette.
Read more about Davidge Hall here.
The latest issue of "CATALYST" magazine highlights the School of Pharmacy's Mass Spectrometry Center; Police and Public Safety's comfort K9 Poe; the Costa Rica Faculty Development Institute; Bill Joyner, JD, MSW, of the Office of Community and Civic Engagement; the School of Social Work's B'more for Healthy Babies; the School of Medicine's work to develop physicians for rural areas; facts about the Universities at Shady Grove, and much more.