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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1349 



taken care of and bronglit up by his paternal 

 grandmother, who resided with the father. A 

 contemporary describes the youth as a great 

 favorite in the village, interested in all kinds 

 of sports and athletic exercises. During the 

 Civil War, the youthful William became cap- 

 tain of a company of zouaves, who, dressed in 

 regulation costume and provided with guns, 

 drilled regularly on the village green. When 

 about twelve years old, William was sent to a 

 nearby boarding school at Winchester Centre, 

 conducted by the Eeverend Ira W. Pettibone, 

 jun uncle by marriage. Here he prepared for 

 Yale College which he entered in 1866, in his 

 sixteenth year, and from which he was gradu- 

 ated in 1870, with the A.B. degree, standing 

 .third in his class. During his college period 

 he impressed his teachers and classmates with 

 the possession of the gifts which afterwards 

 distinguished him in so large a measure. After 

 graduation and before entering upon his med- 

 ical studies, Welch taught school for one year 

 at Norwich, New York. 



Thus it was in his twenty-first year that 

 Welch matriculated at the College of Physi- 

 .cians and Surgeons, in New York City. But 

 this first venture into medicine was very brief. 

 An almost prophetic vision into the future 

 gave him pause and led to his return to New 

 Haven for a year of study in chemistry, which 

 field even at that early date he perceived to 

 hold great future possibilities for the study of 

 medicine. This intermediate year was spent 

 jointly at the Sheffield Scientific School and 

 at the Yale Medical School. In the former, 

 Welch came under the influence of Professor 

 Oscar H. Allen who strongly stimulated his 

 interest in science in general and in chemis- 

 try in particular. This rather unconventional 

 and solitary personality, who was not only 

 ■chemist, but geologist, mineralogist and botan- 

 ist as well, proved to be an inspiring teacher. 

 At the Yale Medical School the professor of 

 chemistry was George Frederic Barker, after- 

 wards professor of physics at the University of 

 Pennsylvania and a member of the National 

 . Academy of Sciences, who was deeply inter- 

 ested at the time in organic chemistry and 

 thus turned his pupil's attention to the writ- 



ings of Kekule which were just then exerting 

 a dominant influence on chemical thought. 

 Within the year the student was mastering the 

 concepts of Kekule in the original German. 

 The breadth of interest of the two able teach- 

 ers under whom Welch had the good fortune 

 to come during this preparatory year, may well 

 have exercised a directive if latent influence 

 on the gifted and impressonable pupil which 

 ■at a somewhat distant day was to assert itself 

 in the determination to break with the tradi- 

 tional and alluring career of private and con- 

 sultative practise, and to embark upon the 

 hazardous one of pathology. This decision 

 was not, however, arrived at immediately or 

 even at the outset of his medical work, but 

 came later as part of a widening knowledge 

 and an enlarging experience. 

 I It was fated also that the two men who, each 

 in his own although different way, were to in- 

 fluence the rise of pathology in the United 

 States, should first come together in the chem- 

 ical laboratory of the Sheffield Scientific 

 School. T. Mitchell Prudden had gone 

 through the school at about the time when 

 William H. Welch passed through the col- 

 lege; but as in that day the two sets of stu- 

 dents — academic and scientific — rarely met 

 and never mingled, the two men were not 

 brought into contact. When Welch entered 

 the laboratory, Prudden was already there, 

 filling a kind of voluntary instructorship ; and 

 thus the two men whose paths were to cross 

 and recross in the many subsequent years of 

 sympathy, perfect understanding and common 

 endeavor, first discovered in each other, albeit 

 still in embryo as it were, that devotion to 

 science and its ideals which as the years length- 

 ened was to prove secure against the many 

 and insistent allurements and pecuniary re- 

 wards of medical practise. 



The year of chemical study over, Welch re- 

 turned definitely to his medical studies. It 

 will aid us a little later in the understanding 

 of the change about to be wrought in the pur- 

 suit of pathology — in the making of advances 

 in which the then unsuspecting medical stu- 

 dent was to play so large a part — if we pause 

 to sketch in broad outline the kind of educa- 



