210 Numbers
medical science looked bleak indeed.^43 Writing home from Paris in 1869,
where he was attending Claude Bernard’s lectures, the aspiring physiolo-
gist Henry P. Bowditch confessed to wanting to devote himself “entirely
to the science of the profession.” He worried that America was “in dan-
ger of being left very far in the rear” if it did not encourage more young
people to take up “medical science,” adding that he did not see why Amer-
icans were “not as capable of doing good work in a scientifi c way as any
other people.”^44
The same year that Bowditch, with the assistance of his family, estab-
lished the fi rst physiological laboratory in the United States—at the Har-
vard Medical School in 1871—a senior colleague, Henry J. Bigelow, was
already complaining of too much science in the curriculum. “In an age
of science, like the present, there is more danger that the average medical
student will be drawn from what is practical, useful, and even essential, by
the well- meant enthusiasm of the votaries of less applicable science, than
that he will suffer from want of knowledge of these,” declared the distin-
guished surgeon. In his opinion, no medical student should “while away
his time in the labyrinths of Chemistry and Physiology, when he ought to
be learning the difference between hernia and hydrocele.”^45
During the years between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of
World War I, an estimated fi fteen thousand American physicians traveled
across the Atlantic to study in German medical centers. When they fi rst
began returning from German laboratories in the 1870s, they experienced
diffi culty in fi nding employment as medical scientists. On coming home
in 1878, the pathologist William H. Welch told his sister that he “was often
asked in Germany how it is that no scientifi c work in medicine is done in
this country, how it is that many good men who do well in Germany and
show evident talent there are never heard of and never do any good work
when they come back here.” The explanation, he continued, was simple:
unlike Germans, Americans gave no encouragement to scientifi c work—
and “the condition of medical education here is simply horrible.”^46 The
only remedy, concluded a like- minded New York colleague, was to turn
American medical schools into “workshops of scientifi c medicine.”^47
Doing so began in earnest in 1893 with the opening of The Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine under the leadership of Welch. Blessed with
a large endowment, Johns Hopkins became the fi rst real center for medical
science in the country. In addition to creating chairs in anatomy, physiol-
ogy, pathology, and pharmacology, it provided their occupants—recruited
nationally—with well- equipped laboratories and salaries suffi cient to free
them from the burdens of practice. Before long Johns Hopkins students