Medicine: Johns Hopkins’ Young

Another of Johns Hopkins’ great medical men died last week.* Dr. Hugh Hampton Young, dead at 74 of a heart attack, went to the Medical School as a graduate student in 1895 and stayed to become a professor and the world’s No. 1 urologist. Of his specialty he once said: “A generation ago a free discussion of my medical work might have been unacceptable. My work has been largely with afflictions about which there is still much ignorance; they are some of the deadliest diseases.”

Urologist Young was born in San Antonio, son of a Confederate general so unreconstructed that he refused to let his son go to West Point and wear a ”Yankee uniform.” After a brief go at journalism, the would-be soldier studied medicine at the University of Virginia, then went back home to practice.

One day some elder surgeons came to watch the novice do an operation. Not having much idea how to proceed, Dr. Young said to one of the visitors: “In your august presence, Dr. Cupples, I could not think of doing this operation.” The flattered surgeon promptly took over. But young Dr. Young collected the $40 fee, used it for carfare to Baltimore.

At Johns Hopkins, keen, blue-eyed Dr. Young soon developed the virtuosity he had lacked in San Antonio. He devised many new operations, many new instruments to perform them with. Mortality in operations for removal of the prostate gland was 20% when he began. His record in 3,000 operations: 3%. He was famed for: 1) his part in developing Mercurochrome as a bloodstream disinfectant (now superseded by sulfa drugs and penicillin); 2) a radical operation for cancer of the prostate; 3) a method of removing the prostate through the urinary outlet; 4) operations which made many a pseudohermaphrodite nearly normal sexually; 5) the Young punch, an instrument to cut through bladder obstructions.

It was the Young punch which brought Dr. Young one of his greatest friends and benefactors. In 1912 “Diamond Jim” Brady went to him in desperate condition from urinary stoppage. Relieved, Diamond Jim lived five more years, during which he gave $200,000 to found Johns Hopkins’ Brady Urological Institute, plus $15,000 a year toward its maintenance. He left it $300,000 more when he died.

*The last of the Big Four— Welch, Halsted, Osler and Kelly — who headed the original faculty when Johns Hopkins Medical School was founded in 1893, was Gynecologist Howard Atwood Kelly; he died in 1943.