whole still concert.'
*
Behind this still concert lay Welch, the impresario. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Welch had become the glue that cemented together the entire American medical establishment. His own person became a central clearinghouse of scientific medicine. Indeed, he became the central clearinghouse. As founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the first and most important American research journal, he read submissions that made him familiar with every promising new idea and young investigator in the country.
He became a national figure, first within the profession, then within science, then in the larger world, serving as president or chairman of nineteen different major scientific organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. Stanford president Ray Wilbur neither flattered nor overstated when in 1911 he wrote him, 'Not to turn to you for information in regard to the best men to fill vacancies in our medical school would be to violate all the best precedents of American medical education.' Welch had, said one colleague, 'the power to transform men's lives almost by the flick of a wrist.'
But his use of power in placing people in positions (or for that matter using it for such things as defeating antivivisection legislation, which would have prevented using animals as experimental models and thus crippled medical research) was trivial in its impact compared to his application of power to two other areas.
One area involved completing the reform of all medical education. The example of the Hopkins had forced more and faster reforms at the best schools. But too many medical schools remained almost entirely unaffected by the Hopkins example. Those schools would learn a harsh lesson, and soon.
Welch's second interest involved starting and directing the flow of tens of millions of dollars into laboratory research.
*
In Europe governments, universities, and wealthy donors helped support medical research. In the United States, no government, institution, or philanthropist even began to approach a similar level of support. As the Hopkins medical school was opening, American theological schools enjoyed endowments of $18 million, while medical school endowments totaled $500,000. The difference in financial support as well as educational systems largely explained why Europeans had achieved the bulk of medical advances.
Those advances had been extraordinary, for medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was experiencing arguably its most golden age - including anytime since. The germ theory had opened the door to that progress. Finally investigators began using that door.
In 1880 Pasteur (who observed, 'Chance favors the prepared mind') was trying to prove he had isolated the cause of chicken cholera. He inoculated healthy chickens with the bacteria. They died. Then chance intervened. He had put aside a virulent culture for several days, then used it to inoculate more chickens. They lived. More significantly, those same chickens survived when exposed to other virulent cultures. Crediting Jenner for the idea, he tried to weaken, or 'attenuate,' his word, cultures and use them to immunize birds against lethal bacteria. He succeeded.
He began applying these techniques to other infections. With anthrax he was not the first to experiment with weakened cultures, but his work was both definitive and very public. While a gallery of newspapermen and officials watched, he inoculated cattle, then exposed them to anthrax; the inoculuated ones lived, while the controls died. Three years later 3.3 million sheep and 438,000 cattle were vaccinated against anthrax in France. He also saved the life of a boy bitten by a rabid dog by giving him gradually stronger injections of fluid containing the pathogen. The next year, 1886, an international fund-raising drive created the
*
Behind this still concert lay Welch, the impresario. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Welch had become the glue that cemented together the entire American medical establishment. His own person became a central clearinghouse of scientific medicine. Indeed, he became the central clearinghouse. As founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the first and most important American research journal, he read submissions that made him familiar with every promising new idea and young investigator in the country.
He became a national figure, first within the profession, then within science, then in the larger world, serving as president or chairman of nineteen different major scientific organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. Stanford president Ray Wilbur neither flattered nor overstated when in 1911 he wrote him, 'Not to turn to you for information in regard to the best men to fill vacancies in our medical school would be to violate all the best precedents of American medical education.' Welch had, said one colleague, 'the power to transform men's lives almost by the flick of a wrist.'
But his use of power in placing people in positions (or for that matter using it for such things as defeating antivivisection legislation, which would have prevented using animals as experimental models and thus crippled medical research) was trivial in its impact compared to his application of power to two other areas.
One area involved completing the reform of all medical education. The example of the Hopkins had forced more and faster reforms at the best schools. But too many medical schools remained almost entirely unaffected by the Hopkins example. Those schools would learn a harsh lesson, and soon.
Welch's second interest involved starting and directing the flow of tens of millions of dollars into laboratory research.
*
In Europe governments, universities, and wealthy donors helped support medical research. In the United States, no government, institution, or philanthropist even began to approach a similar level of support. As the Hopkins medical school was opening, American theological schools enjoyed endowments of $18 million, while medical school endowments totaled $500,000. The difference in financial support as well as educational systems largely explained why Europeans had achieved the bulk of medical advances.
Those advances had been extraordinary, for medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was experiencing arguably its most golden age - including anytime since. The germ theory had opened the door to that progress. Finally investigators began using that door.
In 1880 Pasteur (who observed, 'Chance favors the prepared mind') was trying to prove he had isolated the cause of chicken cholera. He inoculated healthy chickens with the bacteria. They died. Then chance intervened. He had put aside a virulent culture for several days, then used it to inoculate more chickens. They lived. More significantly, those same chickens survived when exposed to other virulent cultures. Crediting Jenner for the idea, he tried to weaken, or 'attenuate,' his word, cultures and use them to immunize birds against lethal bacteria. He succeeded.
He began applying these techniques to other infections. With anthrax he was not the first to experiment with weakened cultures, but his work was both definitive and very public. While a gallery of newspapermen and officials watched, he inoculated cattle, then exposed them to anthrax; the inoculuated ones lived, while the controls died. Three years later 3.3 million sheep and 438,000 cattle were vaccinated against anthrax in France. He also saved the life of a boy bitten by a rabid dog by giving him gradually stronger injections of fluid containing the pathogen. The next year, 1886, an international fund-raising drive created the
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