reversal of anesthesia. However, there is a disarming sentiment most
patients have in the first minutes of wakefulness: loss of awareness in the
passage of time. With me at Lisa’s side helping to guide the gurney, Dr.
Cohen asks her if she’s doing all right.
“Are we almost ready to go?” she asks.
In 1877, in stately Breslau, Germany, Robert Koch first met a young
American named William Henry Welch. Just twenty-seven years of age,
Welch had graduated from Yale and Physicians & Surgeons (the medical
school affiliated with Columbia University in New York City), and like so
many new American graduates, went to Continental Europe for his “grand
tour.” Stops in Strasbourg, Leipzig, and Breslau had exposed Welch to the
world’s most sophisticated microscopists, pathologists, and
bacteriologists. The eager Welch, encouraged by his serendipitous timing,
realized that this new field of pathology would now be his life. Being
tutored by the fathers of the new disciplines, like Koch, Friedrich von
Recklinghausen, Ludwig, Wagner, and Cohnheim would position Welch
for a preeminent role in American medicine.
While Welch was in Leipzig, he met with Dr. John Shaw Billings, the
Army colonel who was responsible for building the Library of the Surgeon
General (now the National Library of Medicine) and who had been hired
by Daniel Coit Gilman, the new president of Johns Hopkins University, to
help design the new hospital at the fledging institution, and was tasked
with recruiting promising physicians to Baltimore.
Armed with an enormous endowment from the wealthy industrialist
Johns Hopkins (a bachelor Quaker), the university was unlike anything
ever built. The hospital (and its associated medical school) would be
patterned after the German laboratory-centric model and the clinically-
based British model.^1 Gilman’s and Billings’s dreams of a scientific
hospital staffed by full-time professors was revolutionary, and demanded
innovative doctors who would commit their lives to changing the way
hospitals operated. Welch and Billings met in 1877 to drink beer at
Leipzig’s Auerbachs Keller, a legendary wine bar and restaurant
(frequented by Goethe), and the prospect of Welch becoming the linchpin
hire at Hopkins was tempting to both visionaries.
In time, William Henry Welch would become the founding physician at
Johns Hopkins University. First, however, he would return to New York