Johns Hopkins, a wealthy merchant and banker, said he considered his wealth a trust to be used “for the good of humanity”. He spent his final years coming up with the best possible plan. When he died in 1873, he left the bulk of his wealth ($7 million) to endow a university of advanced learning, a hospital and a medical school, with the express instructions that the institutions be linked. His gift, then the largest of its kind, did more than pay for bricks and mortar. Hopkins’ then-radical notion that a hospital should be a place to teach and advance the art of medicine, as well as practice it, made Johns Hopkins the model for the modern American medical center, the source of tomorrow’s doctors and tomorrow’s cures.

Photo courtesy of The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions