1909-1912 



VII 



FUNDAMENTALLY, Wherry had bought a pig in a 

 poke. The old medical circus that was Cincinnati had 

 ordered a new top in the year gone by, which had made every 

 medical employee in the U S jittery and hopeful. Daniel 

 Drake's grand school had forgiven its erring son (also some 

 half dozen illegitimate children found in the snow) and all 

 were to live happily together once more as the medical arm 

 of the town's great and growing university. At least four 

 major chairs were to be made "scientific." Wherry had heard 

 of these possibilities a full year before receiving Dabney's 

 telegram and since his wife had come from Cincinnati, she 

 undertook a writing to some of the distant cousins in 

 Wherry's behalf. There was nothing doing. Medical salvation 

 flowed from the side of Johns Hopkins, sometimes Harvard. 

 So Woolley had been brought in. It was his urging that had 

 nominated Wherry as the assistant professor for bacteriology. 

 Dabney described the Cincinnati situation in detail (August 

 10, 1909): 



. . . our new medical college, recently formed by the fusion 

 of the two old medical colleges, the Ohio and the Miami of 

 this city. Both institutions gave up to us [the university of 

 Cincinnati] their charters, good will, properties, moneys, etc 

 — everything in fact — and all members of their faculties 

 resigned, placing themselves entirely in our hands for reor- 

 ganization. The new faculty was then appointed in June last 

 as shown in the catalogue. We are still looking for a profes- 

 sional educator for dean . . . the new city hospital . . . 

 which will cost over four millions of dollars includes a great 

 laboratory for pathology and bacteriology. The university 

 will have control of all its medical and scientific work and it 

 will thus become, for all purposes, the university hospital, 

 though supported by the city at a cost of about one half mil- 



