Welch, William H. (1850–1934), pathologist, bacteriologist, first dean of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.Welch was born in Norfolk, Connecticut, to William Wickham Welch, a physician, and Emiline Collin. He graduated from Yale College in 1870. Failing to secure a teaching position in classics, he turned to medicine, receiving his M.D. degree in 1875 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in
New York City (now part of Columbia University). He studied experimental pathology in Europe for a year before returning to establish America's first pathology teaching laboratory, at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, in 1878. In 1884 he became chairman of the Department of Pathology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the first American university to make scientific research central to its curriculum. As first dean of its school of medicine, which opened in 1893, he made the scientific laboratory essential to the training of physicians and helped create a medical school widely regarded as a model. Among the first Americans to introduce bacteriology into medicine, he identified
Clostridium perfringens, the bacillus of gas gangrene, in 1892, and used the success of bacteriology to promote laboratory research nationwide. Welch founded the
Journal of Experimental Medicine (1895); the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (1918); and the Institute for the History of Medicine, which he headed after his retirement in 1925.
A man of diplomacy and charisma, Welch became the premier national spokesman for scientific medicine. He presided over numerous medical and scientific societies, including the
American Medical Association (1910–1911) and the
National Academy of Sciences (1913–1916). He influenced the funding of scientific research by serving on the boards of various philanthropic organizations, including several financed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
See also
Biological Sciences;
Medical Education;
Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945;
Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations;
Public Health.
Bibliography
Simon Flexner and and James Thomas Flexner , William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine, 1941; reprint 1993.
Donald H. Fleming , William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine, 1954.
Patricia Peck Gossel
