On May 7, 1889, the Johns Hopkins medical hospital in Baltimore opened. Hopkins’ vision was a hospital that would be linked with a medical school, which in turn was to be part of a university, a radical idea that later became the model for all academic medical institutions.

No one knows how Hopkins came up with the idea to found a university linked to a hospital, though there is ample evidence he turned to friends for advice. He may have been influenced by fellow philanthropist Peabody, who had founded the famed Peabody Institute in Baltimore in 1857.

He appointed a 12-member board of trustees, comprising local thought leaders, to carry out his vision. They, in turn, created an environment that attracted top educators and medical professionals to direct the university and hospital. By 1867, Hopkins had arranged for his bequest to be split evenly between the two institutions.

Johns Hopkins had entered business in 1812 at the age of seventeen, and rapidly transformed himself from a grocer’s helper to a millionaire banker, and Victorian Baltimore’s greatest philanthropist.