256 C.-E. A. WINSLOW 



Sedgwick found his career in 1879, his wife in 1881, and the 

 institution to which he and his wife devoted their lives with a 

 rare ardor in 1883. Francis "Walker, who was at this time 

 beginning his brilliant service as president of the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology, had known Sedgwick as a student at 

 Yale, and with a characteristically broad view of technological 

 education, called him to the Institute in 1883 as Assistant Pro- 

 fessor of Biology. He became Associate Professor in 1884, and 

 Professor in 1891 and was head of the department (later known 

 as the Department of Biology and Public Health) until his death. 



In the present prosperous state of scientific education, it is 

 a little difficult to realize what the Institute of Technology meant 

 to its protagonists. In those early days of doubt and difficulty 

 the Institute became a symbol, an Ai'k of scientific education to 

 Walker and the httle band who fought for it at his side. Sedg- 

 wick was one of Walker's closest friends and, like Walker and 

 so many of his faculty, was inspired by a devotion to the ideals 

 of the Institute which is bestowed upon church and nation 

 more often than upon an educational institution. 



Sedgwick's original bent was toward physiology and his first 

 important scientific contribution at the Institute was a study of 

 the dangers of gas poisoning, conducted in collaboration with 

 William Ripley Nichols. These were the golden days of the 

 birth of bacteriology, however, and when Nichols died while on 

 a visit to the European universities some tubes of Koch's strange 

 new gelatin medium were brought back to the Institute with 

 his personal effects. Sedgwick was quick to realize the possi- 

 bilities of the new science and from that time on his own investi- 

 gations and the energies of his department were focused more 

 and more on bacteriology. The medical applications of the 

 subject were being developed by Welch at Baltimore and by 

 Prudden and Biggs and Park in New York, but Sedgwick's 

 training and natural aptitudes made him the pioneer in the 

 broader biological aspects of the new subject. When the 

 Massachusetts State Board of Health was reorganized and the 

 Lawrence Experiment Station was established in 1888, he was 

 appointed biologist to the Board and with Mills, Drown and 



