Pri:paratory to Rlslarch Carei-r 45 



a paper " of interest " another by Dr. Kellogg on " Decaying wood 

 a cause of disease." At that time he found of especial interest also 

 Dr. Vaugiian's "brief but valuable paper" on "Contamination of 

 drinking-water by filtration of organic matter through the soil." 



By 1882 the Michigan State Board of Health had been func- 

 tioning almost a decade, and Dr. Vaughan and Dr. Kellogg were 

 both, at one time or another, among its members and prominent 

 in its deliberations. Dr. Henry Brooks Baker,^" its secretary since 

 1872, had received his medical education at the University of 

 Michigan and the Bellevue Hospital Medical College. He em- 

 ployed Smith for work with the health board immediately follow- 

 ing the Greenville convention. Smith probably was acquainted 

 with each of these leaders in American sanitary science. 



At the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Dr. William Henry 

 Welch, professor of pathological anatomy and general pathology, 

 had within a very few years past established " the first laboratory 

 course in pathology ever given in an American medical school." *° 

 Following this, another similar laboratory had been founded 

 under Professor Theophil Mitchell Prudden" at the College of 

 Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University; and thus two 

 leading American medical schools had recognized pathology " as 

 a subject of independent merit that should be taught practically, 

 in the laboratory."*- Both men had studied abroad: Prudden at 

 Heidelberg, Vienna, and Berlin, part of the time taking work with 

 Rudolph Virchow and Julius Arnold; and Welch at Strassburg, 

 Leipzig, and Breslau under many of the greatest masters of 

 pathology, physiology, physiological chemistry, and other subjects. 

 Both Welch and Prudden w^re of Connecticut birth and graduates 

 of Yale University; Prudden of Sheffield Scientific School and 

 Welch of the College of Arts and Sciences. Before going abroad, 

 Welch had obtained his degree of doctor of medicine from the 

 College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia. Prudden had 

 taught at Yale and studied at the medical school there before 

 beginning work with Dr. Francis Delafield at the College of 



" Henr>' Brooks Baker, Sanitary News 5 (55): 79, Feb. 1885. 



*" Simon and Jannes Thomas Flexner, William Henry Welch and the heroic age 

 of American medicine, 114, New York, Viking Press, 1941. 



" Francis Carter Wood, Theophil Mitchell Prudden, Diet, of Amer. Biog. 15: 

 252-253, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1935. 



" William Henry Welch etc., op. cit., 116-117. 



