Here is Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1903, with a streetcar passing its Broadway frontage. Behind the dome was a hospital designed around patient care, medical teaching and the movement of fresh air.
The photograph comes from the Detroit Publishing Company collection at the Library of Congress.
A hospital planned by a surgeon
John Shaw Billings, an Army surgeon with experience inspecting hospitals, helped plan Hopkins and oversee its construction. He worked closely with architect John Niernsee. Billings approached the project as a place for treating patients, teaching medicine and investigating disease, and those purposes helped determine how the buildings would fit together.
In his account of Billings’s work, surgeon John L. Cameron describes a pavilion plan: separate ward buildings joined by long corridors. The hospital would have spaces for patients receiving charity care as well as patients who paid. It would also include an administration building, a dispensary and a surgical amphitheater.
The hospital opened on May 7, 1889. By the time of this 1903 photograph, the plan had been in use for about fourteen years. The handsome frontage was the public face of a much more extensive arrangement of wards and service buildings behind it.
Keeping the air moving
Hopkins’s own history describes how seriously Billings took ventilation. In parts of the isolation ward, air passed over heating coils in the basement, rose through openings in the floor and left through a chimney. The intention was to keep fresh air moving through the room.
There were consequences for getting around the hospital, too. To separate ward air from the connecting basement corridor, a doctor could have to climb a winding stair, emerge outdoors and then enter the ward. The hospital’s history notes that patients on stretchers also traveled that route.
Three more views of the hospital
A drawing, a color postcard and a closer photograph offer different views of the hospital’s Broadway frontage. The drawing and postcard show the buildings from an angle; the photograph looks directly toward the entrance beneath the dome.
If you want a closer look at the plan, you can explore the hospital’s layout on an 1877 map.
We use AI to help research, write and edit stories across our sites. Here’s how we use AI.Suggest a correction
On the AtlasNewSee where this happened600 N Wolfe St39.2969° N · 76.5924° W
