Category: Hopkins History
Hopkins History: The price tag of federal research support at SoM
March 22, 2010
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has been receiving federal support for research for many decades. Faculty and deans of the school, and university presidents and trustees, have been interested in this source of financial support just as long. On Dec. 9, 1936, President Isaiah Bowman informed the trustees about three federally supported projects […]
Honoring Dr. Gilman
November 16, 2009
The last thing Johns Hopkins trustees wanted to do toward the end of 1910 was to offend the two daughters of their late, beloved first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. But they came close to doing just that.
Corresponding with President Ira Remsen
September 14, 2009
Ira Remsen, Johns Hopkins president, and professor of chemistry, could be direct and to the point in his correspondence. Take the exchange of letters between him and a PhD alumnus, Lyman C. Newell, professor of chemistry at Boston University.
The Camera Club victory
August 31, 2009
When Johns Hopkins students decide something needs to be done, usually they find a way to do it, even if that might mean bribing a senior officer of the university. Consider the case of the Camera Club, a student-run group organized in the mid-1930s. The students enjoyed taking pictures, but they had no place for […]
Milton Eisenhower, Postdocs and the Society of Scholars
May 18, 2009
Johns Hopkins University’s eighth president, Milton S. Eisenhower, never professed to be a scholar. His highest earned degree was a bachelor of science in journalism from Kansas State University. But the former president of Kansas State and Penn State universities used to chuckle when he told friends, “I do have 31 honorary degrees, so I guess they ought to count for something.”
Psychology Exam — 1891
April 27, 2009
Johns Hopkins undergraduate students studying psychology today are likely to be preparing for their spring examinations in that subject, just as students did in 1891.
Preparations for War in 1941
March 2, 2009
Shortly before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Johns Hopkins administrators and faculty anticipated that the nation would be drawn into war. Letters and memoranda in the Hamburger Archives of the Eisenhower Library indicate how quickly they moved to devise plans to protect the university’s valuable books, journals and significant art objects.
Isabel Hampton, First Superintendent of Nursing
January 5, 2009
On May 20, 1889, Elisa P. Perkins, former superintendent of Bellevue Training School for Nurses in New York City, sat down at a desk in her home on North Washington Street in Norwich, Conn., and wrote a five-page letter to Daniel Coit Gilman, who had just recently been pressed into service as director of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He also was president of the university.
Health Costs in Baltimore — 1936
October 27, 2008
It is 1936. You are living in Tokyo and, unexpectedly, you become pregnant. You want to go to the United States to have your baby. What do you do? You ask your husband, a reporter for the Tokyo Advertiser, to write to an old friend and ask him how to make arrangements to have the birth in Baltimore and how much it would cost.
Addressing an ROTC Wartime Emergency
September 29, 2008
This year’s congressional and presidential approval of bills authorizing more than $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes one wonder what Johns Hopkins administrators in July 1942 would have thought about such staggering sums. During that time they were hard-pressed to find a few hundred dollars to purchase wooden rifles for the university’s Reserve Officers Training Corps.