Hugh Hampton Young Collection

Biography

Hugh Hampton Young was born in San Antonio, Texas. He received his A.B. and M.A. in 1893 and an M.D. in 1894 from the University of Virginia. Young came to Baltimore in 1895 to undertake postgraduate work at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 1898, Young became head of genitourinary surgery at Johns Hopkins. He oversaw the development of the Brady Urological Institute and served as its director from its founding in 1915 until his retirement in 1942. He invented numerous operating instruments such as the Young punch, an instrument used to excise the prostate gland, and devised several surgical procedures for treating genito-urinary diseases. He performed the first perineal prostatectomy in 1902 and the first radical operation on a cancerous prostate gland in 1904. Young wrote several books, including Young’s Practice of Urology and A Surgeon’s Autobiography, established the Journal of Urology, and was its editor until his death.

Scope and Content

The Hugh Hampton Young Collection spans his entire life. Series include professional and personal correspondence, patient materials, publications, diaries, patent documents, photographs, motion picture films, diaries and date books, and ephemera. Professional correspondence includes exchanges of letters with colleagues, patients, and professional organizations. Young’s varied personal interests, his civic pursuits, and his accomplishments are documented in his personal correspondence, which includes exchanges with prominent national and international figures. The family correspondence constitutes over 200 letters exchanged between Young and his wife Bessy Colston, both before and during their marriage. There are substantial materials related to his military service with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. This includes his work developing and implementing the Venereal Disease Program in England and France. The patient materials consist of case histories (usually assembled for a research project or article), correspondence with or about patients, patient logs from the Division of Urology, and charts for patients from the Brady Urological Institute. Publications include addresses and manuscripts presented at professional meetings, research material for manuscripts and articles, reprints and drafts of chapters for medical textbooks, and several versions of the manuscript for his autobiography, Hugh Young: A Surgeon’s Autobiography, personally edited by his friend and publisher, Alfred Harcourt. Patent documents, with associated drawings, are included for a soap dispenser and for improvements to seaplane landing gear. Photographic materials in the Young papers include prints, negatives, and film, all of which document his medical career and span the wide range of Young’s civic activities and personal interests. The ephemera collection includes programs, pamphlets, military documents, postcards, newspaper clippings, and a bookplate collection.

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