A. McGehee Harvey Collection

Biography

A. McGehee Harvey was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He received his A.B. in 1930 from Washington and Lee University and his M.D. in 1934 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He spent three years as a Johns Hopkins house officer before doing a fellowship at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. He also worked at the Johnson Foundation for Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. Harvey returned to Johns Hopkins for a year as the chief medical resident, then left in 1941 to join the faculty at Vanderbilt University Medical School. From 1942 to 1945, he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Harvey was appointed professor and chairman of the department of medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1946. During the post-war period, he initiated change and growth in the department by creating new departments and divisions for the emerging subspecialties. In addition to his accomplishments as an administrator, Harvey distinguished himself as a researcher, clinician, diagnostician, and teacher. His early research centered on diseases of the neuromuscular junction, and later he concentrated on systematic lupus erythematosus and paraneoplastic syndromes. In 1973, Harvey was the first faculty member to be named a Distinguished Service Professor. After stepping down as director of the department of medicine, Harvey concentrated on the history of medicine and also served as archivist of the Medical Institutions from 1982 until 1987. He directed planning for the centennial of the medical institutions and was co-author of the two-volume centennial history, A Model of Its Kind.

Scope and Content

The A. McGehee Harvey Collection documents Harvey’s tenure as physician-in-chief and chairman of the department of medicine at Johns Hopkins and, to a lesser extent, his later career as institutional historian and archivist. The collection contains professional correspondence administrative records, committee records, student and house staff records, patient records, grant and endowment files, staff bibliographies, grand rounds records, photographs, slides, illustrations, reprints, and awards.

Catalog Record

Policy on Access and Use
Permissions and Credits