Qualla: Johns Hopkins Hospital

Johns Hopkins Hospital: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0. Johns Hopkins - the Baltimore Quaker merchant and banker whose actual name was Johns - died on Christmas Eve 1873, leaving an estate of about $7 million. It was the largest philanthropic bequest in American history to that point. His will directed that the money go to found three institutions: a hospital, a university, and an orphanage for Black children. The hospital opened on May 7, 1889 on a thirteen-acre tract bounded by Broadway, Wolfe, Monument, and Jefferson Streets in east Baltimore that Hopkins had personally selected. The medical school opened four years later in 1893. The two institutions together are widely considered the founding institutions of modern American medicine. The teaching methods they invented - the residency, the grand rounds, the bringing of medical students into the wards to learn from actual patients - became the global model for how doctors are trained.

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Image: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA | CC0

Johns Hopkins Hospital: Hopkins's Bequest

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit friend, Public domain. Johns Hopkins was born in 1795 in Anne Arundel County to a Quaker family with a complicated relationship to slavery. His grandfather manumitted nine enslaved people in 1778, and the family's Quaker faith shaped a tradition of gradual emancipation — but recent archival research ha...

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Image: friend | Public domain

Johns Hopkins Hospital: The Four That Came

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cboes, CC BY-SA 4.0. The hospital's first four physicians shaped its character for a generation. William Osler, a Canadian who became the first chief of medicine, invented the medical residency - the system by which new physicians work as supervised house staff for years after graduation, learning at...

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Image: Cboes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Johns Hopkins Hospital: Why Women Studied Here First

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Underwood & Underwood, Public domain. Johns Hopkins School of Medicine became one of the first American medical schools to admit women, in 1893 - and it did so because it had to. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad stock that had funded most of the hospital construction had been used up, and there wasn't enough money lef...

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Image: Underwood & Underwood | Public domain

Johns Hopkins Hospital: Blalock, Thomas, and Taussig

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bendann Brothers (American, active 1850s - 1873), Public domain. In November 1944, surgeon Alfred Blalock performed the first blue baby operation at Johns Hopkins - a procedure that saved infants whose congenital heart defects starved them of oxygen. The technique was developed in collaboration with cardiologist Helen Taussig, who had identifi...

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Image: Bendann Brothers (American, active 1850s - 1873) | Public domain

Johns Hopkins Hospital: The Hospital Now

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA, CC0. Johns Hopkins Hospital occupies about 20 of the 60 buildings on the medical campus in east Baltimore. The complex has more than 80 entrances and receives about 80,000 visitors a week. It holds over 1,000 beds and employs more than 30,000 people, including over 1,700 physicians. T...

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Image: Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, MD, USA | CC0