

LIBRARY 

 NEW YORK 



WILLIAM THOMPSON SEDGWICK botanicai. 

 1855-1921 (iAKuatfi 



William Thompson Sedgwick, the father of the modern pub- 

 lic health movement in America, was born at West Hartford, 

 Connecticut, December 29, 1855. He graduated from the 

 Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 1877, his first 

 contribution to scientific literature being a study of the local 

 flora, in collaboration with his college chum and life-long friend, 

 E. B. Wilson. He began the study of medicine, but, dissat- 

 isfied with the haphazard medical education of the time, discon- 

 tinued his course a short time before he would have received 

 his degree. He taught physiological chemistry under Chittenden 

 at the Sheffield Scientific School in 1878-1879, and in 1879 

 accepted a fellowship in biology at Johns Hopkins where he came 

 under the influence of Martin, to receive from him the vision of 

 biology as a broad and hberal science, a vision which Martin 

 brought over from the England of Huxley and transmitted through 

 Sedgwick and Sedgwick's pupils to thousands of students in 

 this country. 



Sedgwick was made assistant in biology at Baltimore and 

 received the degree of Ph.D. in 1881. In the winter following 

 the reception of his doctorate and on the anniversary of his 

 birth, December 29, 1881, he was married to Mary Catherine 

 Rice of New Haven, the beginning of thirty-nine years of a 

 relationship as complete and as beautiful as ever existed between 

 man and wife. Mrs. Sedgwick not only gave to her husband a 

 rare personal devotion which made his health and his comfort 

 and the success of his career a constantly controlling motive, 

 but her artistic tastes and rich temperament kept a warmth and 

 color in his life which made it impossible for Sedgwick ever to 

 feel those fimitations which sometimes accompany a life of 

 intellectual concentration, fimitations which Charles Darwin, for 

 example, felt so pathetically in his later years. 



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^■i JOURNAL OF BACTEBIOLOGY. VOL. VI, NO. 3 



