The Hopkins Welch Medical Library and the Institute of the History of Medicine celebrated their 75th anniversaries with separate receptions in recent weeks, highlighting their successes as well as the challenges that they face trying to provide resources to a new generation of students and researchers.
The Welch Library's celebration, which occurred last Wednesday, featured a number of prominent speakers, including 2003 Nobel Prize Laureate and Professor of Biological Chemistry at the School of Medicine, Dr. Peter C. Agre, who is also a graduate of the School of Medicine.
"When I was a student here, I used to take a lot of naps in one of the cubicles," Agre said. "But it really is a beautiful building. I find the painting of the four doctors [hanging in the library's West Reading Room] particularly inspiring."
The Chairman of the Wilmer Eye Institute, Dr. Peter McDonnell, who is also a graduate of the School of Medicine, expressed his concern for the obstalces that libraries face.
"It was really nice to get a perspective on many of the challenges facing libraries today, which include the rising costs of publishing and greater public access to medical literature," he said.
The Welch Library was one of the first libraries in the nation to recognize the promise of automation of information and resources, a task that has served as the Library's primary goal during the past 20 years.
Automation would reduce the need for students to be physically present in the library to glean knowledge from its almost 400,000 volumes and allow more facilitated access to medical information.
The William H. Welch Medical Library was founded with the merger of three separate libraries, those of the School of Hygiene and Public Health, the School of Medicine, and the library of the Johns Hopkins Hospitals, necessitated by a large growth experienced by all of these libraries between 1890 and 1920.
A friend of Dr. Welch's, Edward S. Harkness provided $500,000 of the $1,500,000 needed to build the library. The rest of the funds were raised by the General Education Board of the university.
The library was designed by New York architect Edward L. Tilton and constructed by the Consolidated Engineering Company in 1928.
The library was the fulfillment of the wishes of the four major founding physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, all of whom were well-known as bibliophiles and proponents of the concept of a medical library which, at the time, was a revolutionary concept.
These physicians were William H. Welch, a pathologist, for whom the library was named and who served as its first director; William S. Halsted, a surgeon; William Osler, a physician; and Howard Kelly, a gynecologist and obstetrician.
Welch also headed the Institute of the History of Medicine, served as the first dean of the medical faculty, and served as the first director of the School of Public Health during his time at Hopkins. All four of these physicians donated numerous volumes from their own private collections to the Welch Library.
Today, the Welch Medical Library has grown from its modest beginnings to a modern, 21st century library. The main building stands on Monument Street between Washington Street and North Wolfe Street.
The library also has several campuses, including the Adolf Meyer Library, the Lilenfeld Library and the Carol J. Gray Nursing Information Resource Center at the School of Nursing.
