Correspondence (ALS), 1914

In the wake of Fielding Garrison's death on 18 April 1935, his close friend, Henry E. Sigerist of the Johns Hopkins University's Institute of the History of Medicine, devoted an entire issue of his Bulletin of the History of Medicine to Garrison's memory. In 1937 Sigerist also began to aid Baltimore businessman Franz Ludwig Tietsch in his plans to edit and publish an "autobiography" of Garrison as he depicted himself in letters to his friends. Sigerist published an appeal in the Bulletin to Garrison's friends to send their correspondence from Garrison to the Institute, where it would be copied and returned "without delay." A similar letter was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association 109:22 (Nov. 27, 1937): 1834. The response was great. The Institute received "about 5000 letters of Fielding H. Garrison" including more than four hundred of the letters were sent in by Garrison's close friend H.L. Mencken.

From the thousands of letters received by the Institute, Tietsch selected those letters which were particularly reflective of Garrison's personality. He then had extracts from those letters typed. Tietsch assigned a number to each page of the typed extracts, and the same numbers to the corresponding letter from which the extracts were made. [These numbers are noted in brackets on the folders in the collections.] Photostatic copies of the selected correspondence were made for the Institute's collections before the originals were returned to their owners.

In some cases, Tietsch decided that none of the Garrison correspondence sent in by a given person was of interest to his project, and excerpted nothing from it. Sigerist's office then sent such letters back to their owners without making copies of them for the Institute's collections. Files belonging to such people, containing only their correspondence with the Institute, have been separated from the rest of the collection, arranged alphabetically, and are located at the end of the series.

Often Tietsch decided that only a portion of the correspondence loaned to the Institute by a correspondent was valuable to his project. In these instances, only the relevant portion of the correspondence was copied for the Institute's files before all the correspondence was returned to its owner. Sigerist's office identified correspondence omitted from the project with a pink slip marked "OUT," often giving the letter's date, addressee and location. These slips are located in the same folders as the rest of the correspondence. In this finding guide, such files have been designated "incomplete." In these instances researchers may wish to check the repositories currently holding the complete correspondence to see if material of interest may be found there.

In yet other instances the owner of the correspondence donated the originals to the Institute or to Tietsch. In this finding guide, such files have been marked "ALS" [autographed letter, signed] or "TLS" [typewritten letter, signed]. A few correspondents made typed copies of the correspondence, donating those to the Institute; these are also marked.

Unfortunately, Tietsch never completed his project, though a preliminary sketch "giving the idea of the kind of book that Mr. Tietsch is preparing" was published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 7:4 (April, 1939). The raw material collected by Sigerist and copied by the Institute remained in the Institute's files. In 1967 Mrs. Janet Teach, widow of F. L. Tietsch, donated to NLM the collection of extracts prepared by her husband as well as the original letters left in his possession. In 1991 NLM, with the Institute's permission, made copies of the photostats and original letters found in the files of the Institute of the History of Medicine. The copies, typed extracts, and original letters still in Tietsch's possession at the time of his death and donated to the library in 1967 were then combined with these copies into one continuous alphabetical series. The original letters and copies are found first, followed by the typed extracts and, when present, any correspondence relating to the acquisition of the letters (identified here as "project correspondence"). The bulk of the project correspondence is either with Henry Sigerist or his secretary.

Interfiled into this series as well are copies of Garrison's correspondence with Otto Juettner at the University of Cincinnati (acquired in 1970) and with William Halsted (from the Halsted papers at the Johns Hopkins University). Also interfiled into the series are three letters to Clara Garrison, the gift of Dr. Solomon Kagan to the library in 1941. Also included in this series is Garrison's correspondence with George Simmons, Morris Fishbein, and Margery Hutchins of the American Medical Association. In 1956 Fishbein loaned the Simmons and Hutchins correspondence to Dorothy Schullian of the History of Medicine Division in order that a microfilm copy of it could be made for the library. At a later date Fishbein gave to the library this correspondence and his own. The microfilm is separately cataloged as MS Film 29. Similarly interfiled is copies of Garrison's correspondence with Herman T. Radin and Burton Chance. The material was loaned to the library by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1959, microfilmed, and the originals returned to the College. The microfilm is separately cataloged as MS Film 31.

The series ends with Tietsch's own correspondence relating to the project, and includes galley proofs and offprints of his publications about Garrison.