WILLIAM THOMPSON SEDGWICK. 51 



Q 



teacher, investigator and public servant. The son of William and 

 Anne Thompson Sedgwick, and a descendant of Robert Sedgwick, 

 who settled in Boston in 1636, he was born in West Hartford, Connecti- 

 cut, December 29, 1855, and throughout his life cherished the tradi- 

 tions of his New England origin and training. He graduated with 

 high rank from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 

 1877, and taught physiological chemistry in Chittenden's laboratory 

 in 1878-1879. In 1879 he became Fellow and subsequently Assistant 

 in Biology at Johns Hopkins University, where he took the degree of 

 Ph.D. in 1881, and in the same year married Mary Catherine Rice of 

 New Haven. He received the honorary degrees of Sc.D. (Yale, 1909) 

 and LL.D. (University of Cincinnati, 1920) and was a member of 

 many learned societies, serving as president of the American Society of 

 Naturalists, of the American Public Health Association, and of the 

 Societ}' of American Bacteriologists, of which he was one of the 

 founders and the first president. He was a member of the Interna- 

 tional Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, of the Advisory 

 Board of the United States Hygienic Laboratory, of the Public Health 

 Council of Massachusetts, of the Royal Sanitary Institute of Great 

 Britain, and of other important organizations. He served as president 

 of the Boston Civil Service Reform Association in 1900 and of the 

 State Association in 1901; and from 1897 down to the time of his 

 death was curator of the Lowell Institute of Boston. 



In 1883 he became Professor of Biology in the Department of 

 Biology, later known as the Department of Biology and Public Health, 

 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then under the presi- 

 dency of Francis Walker. As head of that department he began a 

 service in the teaching of general Ijiology and in the public health 

 movement in America that continued for nearly forty years and 

 brought distinction alike to himself and to his institution, rendering 

 his laboratory one of the important centers of biological work in 

 America. The culmination of the honors that he received came in the 

 last year of his life when he served as exchange professor to the uni- 

 versities of Cambridge and of Leeds, and also as a representative of 

 the Intitute of Technology, Harvard University, the American Public 

 Health ^Association and the U. S. Public Health Service at the Inter- 

 national Health Conference at Brussels. In both capacities, as 

 foreign observers have testified, his lectures and addresses made a 



