William Henry Welch : a biographical sketch / Simon Flexner.

  • Flexner, Simon, 1863-1946.
Date:
[1920?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: William Henry Welch : a biographical sketch / Simon Flexner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    were given by Willard Parker and T. Gaillard Thomas, the prestige of whose strong personalities and eminent careers in surgery and in obstetrics and gynecology respectively mnst have been potent forces. He was thrown as prosector into close association with Sabine and with the demonstrators of anatomy, John Curtis and McBurney. It was especially at the suggestion of Sabine that Welch wrote his graduating thesis upon goitre, which received the first prize, and in the preparation of which he familiarized himself with medical literature and bibliography at the New York Hospital Library. At Bellevue Hospital his contacts with Delafield and with Janeway became numerous and close, the forerunner, as it chanced, of a relationship destined to become even more intimate and significant at a somewhat later period. Moreover, the era in which the young student found himself was one of fundamental flux of belief brought about by the new cellular pathology and the discoveries of Pasteur just impending. Into this whirlpool of shifting ideas, which were to move in the next succeeding years with ever-increasing speed, Welch with his eager, open and responsive mind was thrown. That his imagination was powerfully stirred by the intellectual ferment of the time may be assumed. One circumstance is, however, quite clear: at this stage pathology as an independent career had not been seriously before his mind, nor was it so to present itself until a whole new set of experiences had been passed through. The year and a half’s interneship over, Welch is about to take ship for what proved to be for him and us a great adventure. In April, 1876, in company with his friend and fellow townsman, Dr. Frederic S. Dennis, he sailed on the Cunarder “ Bothnia ” for Liverpool. From Liverpool he went to London where he spent a few days, crossed the channel from Harwich to Rotterdam and made his way leisurely along the flowering Dutch and Belgian fields as the spring was passing into the mild early summer months, toward Strassburg, the first stopping place on the long but important road which was about to fascinate his view. Welch’s European experience begins with Waldeyer, the Director of the Anatomical Institute in Strassburg, with whom he studied normal histology. This subject was of course taken up on account of its fundamental importance as a basis for pathological histology. But it is significant that the interest in chemistry, also as a foundation subject, which carried Welch to New Haven on the very threshold of entrance to his medical studies, had remained alive; hence part of his time was spent in Hoppe-Seyler’s laboratory, under the master himself and his assistant Baumann, in working through the former5s well-known textbook in physiological chemistry. In addition, time was found to attend von Recklinghausen’s autopsies and demonstration course, although at this period no further courses were taken with this master of