at Michigan, William Pepper Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania, William Councilman (Welch's assistant until 1892) at Harvard, others at Northwestern, at New York's College of Physicians and Surgeons, at Tulane) were advancing the same values that Welch and the Hopkins were, and they were doing so with equal urgency. The American Medical Association had pushed reform since its inception, and individual physicians sought better training as well; the thousands who studied in Europe proved that.
But relatively little change had occurred in the bulk of medical schools, and even at Harvard, Penn, and elsewhere, change had often come only after violent infighting, with continual rear-guard actions fought by reluctant faculty. William Pepper had made Penn good enough that the Hopkins raided its faculty, yet after sixteen years of fighting he spoke not of achievement but of 'long and painful controversy.'
Even where change had occurred, a gap between the Hopkins and elsewhere still remained. Harvey Cushing trained at Harvard and came to Baltimore as Halsted's assistant. Nothing in Boston had prepared him for the difference. He found the Hopkins 'strange' . The talk was of pathology and bacteriology of which I knew so little that much of my time the first few months was passed alone at night in the room devoted to surgical pathology looking at specimens with a German textbook at hand.'
The Hopkins did not limit its influence to medicine. Half a century after it opened, of 1,000 men starred in the 1926 edition of American Men of Science, 243 had Hopkins degrees; second was Harvard with 190. Even Harvard's Charles Eliot conceded that the Harvard Graduate School 'started feebly' and 'did not thrive, until the example of Johns Hopkins'. And what was true of Harvard was true of every other university in the land.'
But in medicine the Hopkins made its chief mark. As early as 1900 Welch noted that at the Harvard-run Boston City Hospital 'they have only Hopkins men there, and want no others.' By 1913 a European acknowledged that research in the United States in his field rivaled that done in any European country and gave credit 'to one man - Franklin P. Mall at the Johns Hopkins University.' Of the first four American Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine, the Hopkins had trained three, while the fourth had received his highest degree in Europe.
In patient care its impact was similar. As with all medical schools, most of its graduates became practicing physicians. And within thirty-five years after opening, more than 10 percent of all Hopkins graduates had become full professors, with many younger graduates on track to do so. Many of these men transformed entire medical schools at other universities - people like Councilman and Cushing at Harvard, William MacCallum at Columbia, Eugene Opie at Washington University, Milton Winternitz at Yale, George Whipple (a Nobel laureate) at Rochester.
Howard Kelly, for all his strangeness (a fundamentalist who preached to prostitutes on street corners of whom one student said, 'The only interest he manifested in my classmates was whether they were saved') revolutionized gynecology and pioneered radiation therapy. And no individual had more impact on patient care than William Halsted, who introduced rubber gloves into surgery, who insisted upon preparation and thought prior to every step. He took such care that William Mayo once joked that his patients were healed by the time he finished, but the Mayo brothers also stated that they owed him a tremendous debt. So did all of American surgery: of seventy-two surgeons who served as residents or assistant residents under him, fifty-three became professors.
In the meantime, Henry James described the Hopkins as a place where, despite 'the immensities of pain' one thought of 'fine poetry' and the high beauty of applied science' . Grim human alignments became, in their cool vistas, delicate symphonies in white' . Doctors ruled, for me, so gently, the
Kelly Jones
Paul Quarrington
Shirley Marr
Arlene Sachitano
Sarah Andrews
Becca Jameson
Amy Starling
Jeffery Deaver
S.C. Ellington
Maureen Child