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biography
| name: |
Welch, William Henry
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1850–1934)
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| biography:
| Pathologist, medical educator, and public-health pioneer, born in Norfolk, Connecticut, USA. After taking his MD from the New York College of Physicians (1875), he spent three years studying in Europe with some of the most important medical researchers of the day. Back in New York City, he began work as a pathologist at the Bellevue Hospital and Women's Hospital. Accepting a post as professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University (1883), he returned to Europe briefly to study bacteriology under Robert Koch, then organized a pathological laboratory at Johns Hopkins. He eventually became first dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School (1893–8) and was responsible for introducing many of the reforms and individuals who made Johns Hopkins a major medical centre. In an advisory capacity, he also implanted his ideas on medical schools, education, and research in the newly founded Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research and the Carnegie Foundation. Meanwhile, he had become increasingly more interested in issues of public health, serving as president of the Maryland Board of Health (1898–1922), advising the surgeon-general of the army during World War 1, and becoming the first dean of the new School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins (1918–26). Through all these years he also made notable contributions to medical research, including his discovery that cholera and typhoid were spread by micro-organisms, not miasmas (1887). His book Thrombosis and Embolism (1899) and his discovery of a bacillus (named after him) that produces ‘gas gangrene’ in wounded soldiers, also advanced the fields of pathology and bacteriology in the USA. |
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