Richard J. Johns was born in Pendleton, Oregon. He received his B.S. in 1947 from the University of Oregon and his M.D. in 1948 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, he returned to Johns Hopkins, where he spent the rest of his career. At Johns Hopkins, he first held positions as instructor, assistant professor, and associate professor in the department of medicine. In 1966, he was appointed the first professor and chairman of the new sub-department of biomedical engineering. In 1970, when biomedical engineering was established as a full department in the university, Johns was named its director and served in that capacity until his retirement in 1991. In this oral history, Johns discusses his history with Johns Hopkins and the School of Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering as well as the general history of both facets of Hopkins. This oral history is part of the Mame Warren oral histories series.

Marjorie Lewisohn was born in 1918 in Manhattan. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1940 and went on to complete her degree in medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 1943. In her early career, she spent time treating tuberculosis at Bellevue Hospital. By the 1950s, Dr. Lewisohn had gone into private practice while still maintaining staff physician positions at both Lenox Hill Hospital and Doctor's Hospital as well as a clinical professorship at the New York Hospital- Cornell University Medical Center. She rekindled her connection with Johns Hopkins in 1972, when she began her 18-year tenure as a trustee of Johns Hopkins University. She was the first female trustee of the university. In this history, Lewisohn recounts her experiences as a woman at the Hopkins Medical School in the early 1940s. This oral history is a part of the Mame Warren oral histories series.