Medicine: Popsy

He was a short, round Santa Claus of a man, with a 5¢ cigar stuck in his mouth and a twinkle in his eye. He was also the greatest public-health statesman in the world. This week the full story of this remarkable man, Dr. William Henry Welch, and his remarkable career was told.*

In 1878, when “Popsy” Welch opened the first pathology laboratory in the U.S., there were no medical schools that taught bacteriology, biochemistry, microscopic anatomy, public health. By the time he died, in 1934, at the age of 84, the U.S. had become the world’s center of scientific medicine.

Frogs and Kitchen Tables. Born in 1850, the son of a Connecticut country doctor, William Henry Welch had no taste for medicine. He entered Columbia’s medical school after a brilliant career in Yale, because he could not get the Greek instructorship he wanted. But once on his way, he gave his whole heart to medicine.

After graduation (1875) he went to Germany, studied bacteriology, biochemistry, pathology. That was the golden age of bacteriology, when men like Pasteur, Koch and Ehrlich were starting their researches. But in the U.S. there was not one pathology laboratory. Medical education was cut and dried; students memorized lecture notes, had no experimental and little clinical training.

When Dr. Welch returned to Manhattan he put up a great battle for a laboratory at Columbia, but the dean only smiled at his idea. Finally he wangled a little space in Bellevue Hospital Medical College, furnished it with kitchen tables and a few old microscopes. For specimens, he “skipped through the marshes” after frogs, once hauled back a croaking load on a sleeping car. From frogs he promoted his class to cadavers. So elegant was his dissecting and embalming that his Negro janitor mailed handbills to undertakers, offering to teach them Dr. Welch’s secrets.

In 1884, after ten years’ struggle to make laboratory research, not a fashionable practice, his career, Dr. Welch went to Johns Hopkins as first full-time member of its medical faculty. His friends in New York tried to persuade him not to bury himself in a little, unknown Baltimore school. But the little school attracted not only young Dr. Welch but such giants as famed Clinician William Osier, Surgeon William Stewart Halsted, Gynecologist Howard Atwood Kelly. It grew with them to world fame.

Out of the Lab, into the Fire. During his laboratory years, Dr. Welch did important, highly technical work on Bright’s disease (of the kidneys), thrombosis (formation of blood clots), arterial disease. He also performed some of the pioneer experiments in the cause of diphtheria. Perhaps his most significant contribution was his discovery of a germ which became his namesake, the Bacillus welchii, producer of gas gangrene. This was his last piece of laboratory research. In the early 1900s he gradually moved into the spotlight, began “charming and beguiling” millionaires out of money for public health, lighting firecrackers under stodgy old professors, hammering principles of hygiene into the public ear. For some years before his death he was busy with Rockefeller projects in China.

In a half century, Dr. Welch revolutionized U.S. medical education. He played a major role in:

> Establishing the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, best in the world (1901 ). The original gift was for $20,000 a year, but by 1928 the Rockefellers had given it $65,000,000—much of it wheedled by Dr. Welch. The aim: to make laboratory discoveries immediately available for treatment.

> Linking medical-school staffs to large public hospitals, combining bedside medicine with laboratory tests and experiments. From 1907 to 1913 Dr. Welch campaigned vigorously for full-time professors of clinical medicine.

>Founding a model School of Hygiene at the Hopkins, in 1916, after three decades of battle. During this time he helped stop a cholera epidemic in Manhattan, modernize Baltimore’s sewage system, introduce pasteurized bottled milk, pass a Pure Food & Drug Act.

>Starting top-flight health organizations like the National Tuberculosis Association (1904), the Mental Hygiene movement (1909). He also founded the world’s best history of medicine school at the Hopkins (TIME, Jan. 30, 1939).

Tall Stories, High Jinks. Although he was tremendously popular with his students, Dr. Welch never made intimate friends of any of them, not even Dr. Flexner, his favorite. For years no one dared call him Popsy to his face. Yet he did not act like a lonely, reserved bachelor —he was always dapper, always nimble on his little feet, always ready for fun. He loved carnival life: Coney Island, Hollywood, roller coasters, ice cream. He gorged himself on everything from terrapin to ham & eggs, ate from three to six desserts, became “irritated” if his friends stopped at one. An opera, painting, baseball fan, he astonished musicians and sports experts with his lore.

One of his favorite occupations was spinning tall stories. Once, toward the end of his life, he told a dinner party about his exploits as an airplane pilot, held everyone spellbound. Even his relatives were fooled, forgot that Popsy couldn’t even drive a car.

*William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine; Dr. Simon Flexner & James T. Flexner; Viking; $3.75.