The painting depicts John Beale Davidge, a physician known for his ideas about yellow fever and founding the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Sonja Anderson – Daily CorrespondentJuly 28, 2025 7:00 a.m.

A one-of-a-kind painting has been discovered in a closet in a permanently closed Baltimore seafood restaurant. The 1844 oil portrait depicts John Beale Davidge, an American doctor who co-founded the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the early 19th century.

The university’s Davidge Hall once housed a small grayscale portrait of its namesake, dating to the 1800s, but that painting was stolen in the 1990s. The school commissioned a replacement Davidge portrait in 2007, painted by Maryland artist Laura Era, but staff mourned the loss of the original.

So when Meg Fielding, director of the History of Maryland Medicine at the Maryland State Medical Society, recently got a text from a friend saying she’d found a portrait of Davidge while cleaning out the local shuttered Bertha’s Mussels restaurant, Fielding says, per a statement by the university, that her heart stopped.

Fielding went to examine the piece, a dirty but undamaged oil painting of about two square feet. As she tells the Baltimore Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley, “I knew who it was right away.”

Davidge, born in 1768 in Annapolis, Maryland, rose to prominence as a physician during Baltimore’s yellow fever epidemics in the late 18th century, from which the city’s doctors “fled for the hills,” as Larry Pitrof, the executive director of the university’s Medical Alumni Association, tells the Sun. “But not John Davidge.”

“He had a theory that yellow fever wasn’t contagious, which turned out to be true,” Pitrof says. “The common mosquito was the culprit. He stayed in Baltimore and treated patients with yellow fever and was a calming presence in the city.”

In 1807, Davidge and two other doctors obtained a charter for the College of Medicine in Maryland, which became the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Per the statement, Davidge was the school’s chair of anatomy and surgery for the rest of his life.

The recently discovered painting hung for years on the wall of Bertha’s Mussels, which shuttered in 2023, reports the Baltimore Banner’s Jasmine Vaughn-Hall. On the back of the portrait are the words “From the original: Copied by A.L. Ratzka, New York, 1844.” But, confusingly, the only known artist by that name wasn’t born until 1869, according to the Sun. As the newly discovered painting is dated to just 15 years after Davidge’s death, it’s the oldest surviving portrait of the doctor, says Pitrof in the statement.

“I might have bought it at a flea market—that kind of thing,” Bertha’s former owner, Tony Norris, tells the Baltimore Fishbowl’s Eddy Calkins. “I mean, I didn’t pay a lot of money for it.”

Norris says he knew who the painting’s subject was, and he was always waiting for somebody to comment on the portrait of Davidge Hall’s namesake, but it largely went unnoticed—until Fielding came to examine her friend’s find. She purchased the painting from Norris.

The painting is now on temporary display inside Davidge Hall, the “oldest continuously used medical education building in the Western Hemisphere,” per the statement. The building will soon undergo renovations scheduled to complete in 2026, after which the portrait will take up a permanent residence next to a bust of Davidge.

As Pitrof tells the Sun, this “extraordinary” portrait of the medical school’s co-founder is, at the moment, the only one of its kind. “Until another one shows up, this is our Mona Lisa.”

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-rare-portrait-of-marylands-medical-hero-was-rediscovered-in-a-mussels-joint-180987053/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=93490758