A. McGEHEE “MAC” HARVEY, Med 1934, was physician-in-chief of the hospital and served as mentor to generations of medical students during his more than 40-year professional association with Hopkins. Dr. Harvey, who died in 1998, is credited with bringing the scientific approach in clinical medicine to its full fruition, through the application of techniques and discoveries in the basic sciences to unsolved clinical problems. He chaired the Department of Medicine for 27 years. Stepping down in 1973, he concentrated his research on the history of medicine. From 1982 to 1987, he directed the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives. As the School of Medicine’s chief historian and archivist, he wrote nine books on the history of medical and scientific discovery, including a two-volume history of the hospital. Dr. Harvey served as president of the Association of American Physicians and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 1973, he was the first Hopkins professor to be named a University Distinguished Service Professor.
This professorship also honors his wife, ELIZABETH TREIDE HARVEY, Med 1943, for her contributions to Hopkins and her steadfast support of her husband. She and her husband married in 1941, at the end of her third year of study at the School of Medicine. That year they left Baltimore for his appointment on the faculty of Vanderbilt School of Medicine, but in 1942, when he joined the Johns Hopkins Unit in the Pacific theater of operations during World War II, Mrs. Harvey returned to complete her MD at Hopkins. She worked for the remainder of the war in the pediatric syphilis clinic with physician Mary Goodwin. She died in 2006 at the age of 90.
