 The Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine began in 1963 with the development of the Division of Chronic and Community Medicine at what was then the Baltimore City Hospitals, the predecessor of the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Baltimore City Hospitals operated a long-term facility on its campus, which served as a nursing home and chronic hospital for the poor.
In 1963, a young physician, Mason F. Lord, M.D., established the Division of Chronic and Community Medicine in an effort to improve health care for institutionalized elderly patients. He developed a community outreach program and established a formal review of each patient in the long-term care facility with a goal of finding a community site for placement whenever possible. Dr. Lord established multidisciplinary care teams and developed what continues as the multi-disciplinary, initial evaluation conference performed for every patient admitted to the facility. Dr. Lord died in 1965 at the age of 39, just as he was beginning to make significant strides in improving care of the institutionalized elderly. A series of directors continued Dr. Lord’s pioneering efforts in the area of institutionalized care and chronic medicine. In 1983, the division expanded its clinical programs and subsequently broadened and deepened its teaching and research activities. The division sought to respond to patient needs by creating a network of care programs. In the 1970s, two programs were established independently of geriatrics as a foundation of the continuum of care: a primary care practice (predominantly of elderly patients) and a physician house call program. These programs initially operated from the physician’s office in the community and in 1983 were moved to the long-term care facility. The proximity of programs and ease of communication among physicians and other members of the care team created the elements of an organized continuum of health care for the elderly. Since 1983, additional programs have been developed. In 1991, a new facility, the Johns Hopkins Geriatrics Center, was built to replace the original long-term care facility and to house the allied programs in geriatric medicine. The Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center is the major site of the clinical, educational and research programs in geriatric medicine of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In May 2003, Medical Center officials recognized John R. Burton, M.D., former director of the Johns Hopkins Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology, by renaming The Johns Hopkins Geriatrics Center building the John R. Burton Pavilion in his honor. It will remain home to many of Johns Hopkins Bayview’s long-term programs. Today, the Johns Hopkins Bayview Care Center is a 224-bed skilled nursing facility and chronic hospital, providing ventilator/respiratory care, inpatient rehabilitation, complex medical care, specialized wound therapy and palliative care. The Care Center differs from many other nursing homes in that it is staffed by experts in geriatric medicine. There is a geriatrician (a doctor who specializes in diseases of the elderly) assigned to every unit. Most of the Center’s registered nurses and nursing assistants are certified specially to care for the elderly. Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center also is enriched by the presence on campus of three federal research programs: the National Institute on Aging, which in 1941 originated as the Department of Gerontology, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Center of Inherited Disease Research Center, built in 1968 when aging research was part of a different institute. | 
