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The Medical Model
| Article
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16042 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
3,096 Words |
| Author
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Randi Henderson
Randi Henderson is a feature writer for the Baltimore Sun who
specializes in medical writing. She has covered Johns Hopkins
Hospital extensively. |
The story of one of the world's most renowned medical centers begins, romantically enough, with a story of unfulfilled love.
He was the 17-year-old son of a tobacco farmer, described even in his youth as a young man with a head for numbers, a skillful trader. She was his 16-year-old first cousin, her heart smitten--as his biographer would later write--by "his sympathy with children, his courteous way toward women… and above all, his strong, compelling masculinity."
But Johns Hopkins and his cousin Elizabeth Hopkins would never marry; would never live out the life that they may have envisioned for themselves as idealistic teenagers in love. The Quaker religion in which they had been raised prohibited the marriage of first cousins, and they both felt bound by the stricture.
Indeed, the Quaker religion was highly influential in the growth and development of the man who would bequeath much of his fortune to establish the hospital that would bear his name.
Johns Hopkins, born May 19, 1795, the second of 11 children of an Anne Arundel Country, Maryland, tobacco farmer, might have spent his life on Whitehall, the family plantation. But in 1807, conforming with the dictates of the Society of Friends, John's father, Samuel, freed the slaves whose labor had kept the plantation profitable.
Young Johns--named for the family of a great-grandmother on his father's side--stayed on the farm for five more years, then was sent to Baltimore to assist his uncle Gerard with his wholesale grocery business. The plantation could no longer support the large family.
So Johns and Elizabeth, living under the same roof for a time, met and fell in love and pledged to each other that even if their love was never to be fulfilled, neither would they ever love another. Unable to marry each other, they never married at all. For the rest of their lives they remained close friends.
Contemporaries of Johns Hopkins and historians who studied his life concluded that the energy that he might have diverted into home and family instead went into building his growing fortune. From his uncle's grocery business he branched out into supplying tobacco and corn whiskey, then into lending the money he was making. As a banker he became increasingly involved with the Baltimore and Ohio
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