William H. Welch - Biography

Biography

Born to William Wickham Welch and Emeline Collin Welch in Norfolk, Connecticut, Welch was educated at Norfolk Academy and the Winchester Institute. His father as well as a grandfather and four of his uncles were all physicians. William Henry entered Yale University in 1866, where he studied Greek and classics. He received an A.B. degree in 1870. As an undergraduate, he joined the Skull and Bones fraternity.

After a short period of teaching high school students in Norwich, New York, Welch went to study medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, in Manhattan. In 1875, he received his MD. In 1876 and 1877, he studied at several German laboratories to work with, among others, Julius Cohnheim. He returned to America in 1877 and opened a lab at Bellevue Medical College (now a part of New York University Medical School). In 1884, he was the first physician recruited to be a professor at the newly-forming Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. By 1886 he had sixteen graduate physicians working in his laboratory – the first postgraduate training program for physicians in the country. He helped the trustees recruit the other founding physicians for the hospital – William Stewart Halsted, William Osler, and Howard Kelly. Welch became head of the Department of Pathology when the hospital opened in 1889. In 1894, he also became the first dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and in 1916, he established and led the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. He also established the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins in 1929.

Welch continued to practice and teach pathology. He was a popular teacher. Indeed, his nickname among medical students and postgraduate trainees was "Popsy." Graduates of his training programs were highly coveted as academic physicians. Medical schools and institutes across the country vied for Welch's former students and graduate scientists to fill top posts. Many of his residents went on to become highly prominent physicians, including Walter Reed, co-discoverer of the cause of yellow fever, Simon Flexner, founding director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and future Nobel laureates George Whipple and Peyton Rous.

Welch's research was principally in bacteriology, and he is the discoverer of the organism that causes gas gangrene. It was named Clostridium welchii in recognition of that fact, but now the organism usually is designated as Clostridium perfringens.

From 1901 to 1933 he was founding president of the Board of Scientific Directors at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He was an instrumental reformer of medical education in the United States as well as a president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1913–1917. He also was president of the American Medical Association, the Association of American Physicians, the Congress of American Physicians & Surgeons, the Society of American Bacteriologists, and the Maryland State Board of Health. Welch was a founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Welch served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I, and remained in the Reserve Corps for three years thereafter, attaining the rank of Brigadier General (07). For his service during the War, Welch received the Distinguished Service Medal.

A the age of eighty-four, Welch died on April 30, 1934 of prostatic adenocarcinoma at Johns Hopkins Hospital.