Johns Hopkins University

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, a private, non-sectarian institution of higher learning, opened on 22 February 1876 in Baltimore, Maryland, as the country's first research-based, graduate-level university. Funded by the Baltimore Quaker merchant Johns Hopkins with a bequest of $7 million—the largest philanthropic gift given to that date in the United States—the university was modeled after the great European universities. It was the first to combine the liberal arts, the classics, and scientific research. Known since its inception for innovative programs, many consider Johns Hopkins to be the first modern American research university. It revolutionized higher education, medical training and practice, and, not least, provided an unlikely arena in the battle for women's equality.

The university, which has eight academic divisions, first opened in modest classrooms in downtown Baltimore, but soon moved north to Baltimore's more spacious Homewood section, where the main campus is still located. The university's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, launched what many at the time considered to be an audacious and unprecedented academic experiment to merge teaching and research. He dismissed the idea that the two were mutually exclusive: "The best teachers are usually those who are free, competent, and willing to make original researches in the library and the laboratory," he stated. To implement his educational plan, Gilman recruited internationally known luminaries such as the biologist Henry Newell Martin; the Greek scholar Basil Gildersleeve; the classicist Charles D. Morris; the economist Richard T. Ely; and the chemist Ira Remsen, who became the second president of the university in 1901.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore opened to much fanfare in 1889. The university's research-based pedagogy soon attracted world-renowned faculty members who became giants in the emerging field of academic medicine, including William Osler, William Halsted, Howard Kelly, and William Welch.

In the age of scientific discovery and bacteriology, the opening of the country's first research-based hospital was propitious. John Shaw Billings, a surgeon and the country's leading expert on hospital construction, designed the pioneering hospital, the first in the country to offer, among a host of innovations, central heating. With its well-equipped laboratories and rooms, patients benefited from the new "bench-to-bedside" transfer of research from laboratory to patient. Faculty became clinician-physicians. The hospital's charter, reflecting the Quaker philosophy of its founder, mandated hospital care for the "sick and indigent" of Baltimore.

The founder of the university had always hoped to establish a modern medical school, sorely needed in the late nineteenth century, when medical education was in its infancy. At the time, there were few academic standards and even fewer known medical cures. A student could study for a few months at a proprietary medical school or apprentice with a physician. But the university faced a major hurdle. Soon after the completion of the hospital, the remaining endowment earmarked to start the medical school sank with the misfortunes of the 1880s stock market. In 1889, President Gilman put forth a national plea for a "man of large means" to endow the proposed medical school. The search for a benefactor took four years. The person who stepped up to the plate was Mary Elizabeth Garrett, the thirty-eight-year-old daughter of John Work Garrett, a Hopkins trustee and president of the powerful Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from 1858 until his death in 1884.

Despite Gilman's stated intention to make the university a place to "to develop character and to make men," it soon became a battleground for women's rights. Mary Garrett headed the national Women's Medical School Fund, founded in 1890 to raise money to make the proposed Hopkins medical school coeducational. The fund's roster included the country's wealthiest and most prominent grande dames and activists. They organized into fifteen chapters across the country and eventually raised $100,000. Garrett contributed $354,000, one of the largest amounts given by a woman in the nineteenth century, for the balance needed to open the medical school. She insisted on several unprecedented conditions, notably that women were to be admitted "on the same terms as men," and that the new medical students have a baccalaureate degree with a background in science and language.

One commentator at the time called the Hopkins victory the "crowning achievement for American feminism in the nineteenth century." In the fall of 1893, three women medical students took their place with fifteen male students. Hopkins became the nation's first coeducational, graduate-level medical school and the prototype for academic medicine. The Hopkins medical school ushered in a heightened era of medical standards, which emphasized bedside learning, research projects, and laboratory training. The new medical school produced some of the most outstanding scientists and physicians in the United States during the twentieth century.

Hopkins is known for a range of other groundbreaking programs. The Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, is the oldest American university press in continuous operation. In 1909, the university was among the first in the country to start adult continuing education programs and by the end of the century offered classes in numerous sites around Maryland and the District of Columbia. In the mid-twentieth century, the university began to focus on international programs. Since 1950, the

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Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., has been a division of Hopkins. In addition to the nation's capital, the school has campuses at Nanjing, China, and Bologna, Italy. In 1977, the university acquired the famed Peabody Institute in Baltimore, a leading professional school of music, founded in 1857.

In 2001, Hopkins enrolled 18,000 students and employed more than 25,000 full-time, part-time, and temporary employees, making it one of the top five employers in Maryland. In 1999, it ranked first in federal research and development funds, receiving $770.5 million, given primarily to the Applied Physics Laboratory. The School of Medicine is the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health grants and Hopkins consistently is named among the top universities and medical centers in the world. Its endowment tops $1.8 billion, making it the twenty-third wealthiest university in the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chronicle of Higher Education, Almanac Issue, 2001–2002.

Harvey, A. McGehee, et al. A Model of Its Kind. Vol. 1, A Centennial History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Vol. 2, A Pictorial History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Schmidt, John C. Johns Hopkins: Portrait of a University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Warren, Mame. Johns Hopkins: Knowledge for the World, 1876–2001. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Kathleen Waters Sander

See also Coeducational Movement ; Education, Higher: Colleges and Universities ; Medical Education ; Medical Research .