*ZQ would advise: "Then cut them both out and get right into the 



JU middle of it." 



Wherry's own ability in literary line was not mean and yet 

 such instruction did not fail to influence him. In his fairly long 

 list of "publications," closeness of diction and accuracy of 

 statement are characteristic. One of his most important con- 

 tributions to medical science (his discovery of plague in the 

 ground squirrels of California) is but twenty pages long, with 

 much of this space devoted to illustration; and another (his 

 discovery of "tularemia" in man) is definitively set forth in a 

 ten-page account; his description of the blood coagulating 

 factor extractable from normal lung, occupies eight; and 

 numerous others do not take in four. 



As the quality of a pupil's output improved, Hektoen 

 entered it upon the programs of the Chicago pathological 

 society. By 1 898 this had become peculiarly "his." He had just 

 been made its president and in this capacity he was to continue 

 four years. In its arena the public was first to know that a new 

 figure had been born into medical observation and opinion. At 

 various times there, a man named Wherry had demonstrated 

 some "specimens." But in the third year of his medical course 

 he brought an article [ 1 ] to print. It was an elaboration 

 merely of some of Hektoen 's earlier observations on histo- 

 logical change in heart muscle and important only because 

 his first. In the absolute it did not amount to much. Even as 

 it was being set in type Wherry was shifting the point of 

 emphasis in his pathological philosophy — from main interest 

 in the tissue reaction to that of its causative agencies. His 

 reports of "autopsy" findings out of the laboratory were to 

 bring the first indications of this change as they accented 

 increasingly their bacteriology. 



THE stress of living eased somewhat in the Wherry house- 

 hold in the summer months of 1900 and the medical 

 student did not have to sell any more clothes to keep going. 

 The father had been called back to India, taking mother and 

 Nellie with him; and the other girls had married. It gave 

 Wherry opportunity to consort for a season with America's 

 greatest figure in parasitology — Theobald Smith — then active 



