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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    pathology had not become an independent subject of teaching, but was attached to the chair of medicine, still, as it happened, under Doctor Clark, who had been transferred to the professorship of pathology and clinical medicine. There is no reason to suppose that Clark treated pathology otherwise than by lectures, with perhaps at most the occasional use of specimens from the deadhouse. On the other hand, Francis Delafield, who had become adjunct professor of pathology and clinical medicine, was already studying assiduously with the microscope the pathological changes in the kidneys in Bright’s disease and still other morbid processes, as viewed indeed from the standpoint of the new cellular pathology just struggling into the light. But of opportunity for the student himself to acquire even the rudiments of the technique of the microscopic study of the organs and tissues in health and disease, there was none. It was not, therefore, just at this juncture in Welch’s history that his interest in pathology asserted itself. A compelling circumstance was, however, imminent. Among the prizes offered to students was one provided by Doctor Seguin, then the professor of diseases of the nervous system, for the best report of his clinical and didactic lectures. It consisted of a Varick microscope fitted with superior French triplex lenses. This prize was won by Welch, and it proved indeed to be the spark which ignited the tinder of his latent interest in pathology and caused it to burst into flame. Fortunately Welch now entered in October, 1874, upon his interneship at Bellevue Hospital, where this strongly aroused impulse was to find an abundant field for expression. He now also came more directly under Delafield’s influence, and was thrown with the elder Janeway. Much of his time was spent in the deadhouse performing autopsies, first on his own and then on many other cases; and it is a remarkable tribute to his technical skill and acumen of observation, as well as felicity of description, that Delafield invited him to use his special hook for recording the protocols of the postmortem examinations, and that he was made a curator of the Wood Museum attached to the Hospital. Although it was perhaps not clearly perceptible at the time, it now appears that the circumstances surrounding and thus acting upon the sensi¬ tive imagination of Welch, the student, were favorable to his development; for notwithstanding the poverty of material resources and of laboratory facilities of the era, he had the good fortune to come under the influence in the medical college of not a few men of remarkable mental vigor and attain¬ ments. Besides those already mentioned, there were on the faculty of the College in his day Dalton and Curtis in physiology, St. John and Chandler in chemistry, Edward Curtis in materia medica, Markoe in surgery, Sands and Sabine in anatomy and McLane in obstetrics; weekly clinical lectures