This presentation will reveal distinctive and persistent architectural and material aspects of the history of the world’s largest biomedical library—the National Library of Medicine—an institution which currently bridges physical and digital worlds while charting its future squarely in virtual realms. Located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Library of Medicine was previously known as the Army Medical Library. From 1887 until 1962, it was co-located, with the Army Medical Museum, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. There, the library and museum occupied a building which contemporaries called the “Old Red Brick,” designed in the 1870s by Adolf Cluss (1825-1905), the influential German-American architect, and John Shaw Billings (1838-1913), the physician, bibliophile, and visionary leader of the library. In October 1968, the doors of the “Old Red Brick” were ceremoniously closed in preparation for its demolition and the construction of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Figures 1-2). In 1969, staff collected bricks and related remnants from the site for keepsakes (Figure 3) and to offer as retirement gifts to colleagues and friends of the library and museum (Figure 4). Since that time, many of these bricks have returned to the National Library of Medicine, and to the National Museum of Health and Medicine (the modern iteration of the Army Medical Museum), as part of materials donated to the institutions by former staff, or by medical and scientific leaders who received the bricks as tokens of appreciation. Through the intersecting lenses of art history, architectural history, and material culture studies, this presentation will explore the historical meaning and broader cultural significance of the placement, pathways, persistence, and preservation of physical pieces of the “Old Red Brick”—as well as related institutional matériel—in its increasingly digital successor institution, the National Library of Medicine.
Dr. Reznick is an award-winning historian who maintains a diverse, interdisciplinary, and highly collaborative research and writing portfolio supported by the NLM and based on its diverse collections and associated programs. As a cultural historian, he is author of three scholarly books, most recently War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter: A Cultural History of a Creative Life (Anthem Press, 2022). He is also co-author and co-editor of numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and author of many book reviews, articles for the popular press, and entries in major reference works. Dr. Reznick lectures internationally on a variety of historical and contemporary health subjects, speaking to both academic and non-academic audiences at a variety of professional meetings and institutions. He has also done numerous press interviews including with the BBC, CBS Sunday Morning, The Christian Science Monitor, Emory Magazine, KUNC Public Radio, New York Times, Rochester Review, Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Washingtonian Magazine, and WUSA Channel 9 News of Washington, DC.