William Henry Welch
And the Heroic Age of American Medicine. Byand. Viking, $3.75.
NOT many people have the opportunity of working under a young master scientist in a new and properly supported laboratory. Not only was the laboratory new but it was part of a new medical school in the inspiring Johns Hopkins University of the eighties and nineties. This was the medical environment in which Simon Flexner grew up, and it was his great good fortune to have William Henry Welch as dean and professor. He remained Popsev’s right-hand man tor nearly a decade; for thirty-five years they were closely associated in many important endeavors. This splendid biography is a natural tribute to one of the greatest teachers a young man could have. It shows all the way through that it was written about a master by a pupil who revered him.
This book is concerned with a doctor’s doctor, and a great leader of scientific thought. His work was to bring the resources of microscopic pathology and bacteriology to the doctor. When he opened his meagre laboratory in 1878, in old Bellevue Hospital in New York, he was one of the first men in America to initiate a career as a specialist in pathology. Partly because the time was ripe, more importantly because of his character and his complete devotion to scienee, his career was a shining success. His early struggle in New York was rewarded when President Gilman, advised by that great American physician, John Shaw Billings, chose him as the first professor in the new medical school in Baltimore. In this position he played a leading part in securing the other early leaders of the school, Osier, Halsted, and Kelly, who together with Welch were the ‘big four.’ Others, later to become as eminent, were chosen in different fields, and the torches of science they carried combined to make the great light of Hopkins.
Those who are young or even middle-aged today can have little concept of what ‘ the Hopkins meant to medicine in the nineties. New fields were opening up. New ideas of teaching were being tried out. New facilities were building. When Welch went to Baltimore in 1884, the doctors had anæsthesia and asepsis, to be sure. But they hardly knew how to use them. Patients had appendicitis, but doctors did not know it as a disease until Fitz of Boston discovered it in 1886. Patients had gas gangrene of their wounds, but doctors did not know what it was until Welch discovered in 1892 the bacilli that caused it. But his greatest contribution was to inspire pupils and doctors to be open-minded and curious and therefore to be scientific in their daily work.
Later Welch was adviser, par excellence, to those who were working to develop and spread medical science. There is no place for a list of activities here, but it must be mentioned that he played as great a part in advising the direction of effort during the first twenty years of the Rockefeller Foundation as he did in setting the tone of the medical work at Hopkins.
Here is an unforgettable picture of a charming Connecticut Yankee, full of common sense. Welch is shown to us as a man of simple tastes, of great scientific curiosity, who was above all interested in and inspiring to younger men. He graduated from Yale with a fine education in the classics. He then went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. But his education in real medical science was in several of the finest laboratories of Germany when the German laboratories led the world. As a teacher he was a believer in the principle of laissez faire at its best. To him this meant picking the right man, giving him a proper environment, and leaving him alone except tor encouragement. This is what President Gilman did tor Welch anti what Welch in turn did for Flexner and many, many others.
CHARLES C. LUND
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