The effect of conditions on the relation of seed plants to H-ion concentration of nutrient solutions: B. M. DUGGAR. The results of work previously reported indicate that in the preparation of salt (or so-called mineral nutrient) solutions for the solution culture of seed plants under the most favorable conditions, consideration must be given to the hydrogen ion concentration as well as to salt proportions. The hydrogen ion concentrations of carefully prepared and analytically pure monobasic phosphates are for some plants near or above the critical point for growth maintenance. The effects of changes in the environment, especially temperature and humidity affect in no simple manner the response of the plant to changes in PH. The optimum Р like the optimum temperature may be represented by a considerable range of values and may be defined closely only in relation to other environmental conditions.

The relation of dextrose to hydrogen ion concentration with B. Coli: WILLIAM H. CHAMBERS. By correlating the property of B. coli to produce acid from dextrose with the property of alkali formation in dextrose-free bouillon, it was possible to control the hydrogen ion concentration of a growing culture within a narrow zone by the addition of small amounts of dextrose at frequent intervals. The initial amount of dextrose furnished determined the maximum hydrogen ion concentration attained. Reversion of reaction is demonstrated in bouillon with .3 per cent. or less of dextrose. Growth curves plotted from plate determinations show the inhibitory and lethal effects of alkali and acid.

The determination of small amounts of chlorine in tissues: RICHARD D. BELL and E. A. DOISY. A method, based on that of Neumann, is described for the rapid determination of 3-10 mg. of chlorine in tissues. The tissue is digested with sulfuric acid and persulfate and the gases absorbed in alkali. No cyanide is formed by this digestion process. The sulfur dioxide evolved reduces hypo-chlorite to chloride. The chlorides are precipitated with standard silver nitrate. The mixture is concentrated to a small volume, made up to 25 c.c. and filtered. The filtrate is titrated using the solutions of McLean and Van Slyke. For whole blood and plasma, the results agree with those obtained by Foster's modification of the method of McLean and Van Slyke.

Pectin studies; I. Effect of pectin on the hydrogen ion concentration of acid and of alkaline solutions: H. E. PATTEN and T. O. KELLEMS.

The oxidation of acetoacetic acid by hydrogen peroxide in the presence of glucose: P. A. SCHAFFER.

Influence of fermentation on the starch content of experimental silage: A. W. Dox and LESTER YODER. A study of experimental corn silage at different stages of fermentation which was normal as regards development of aroma and changes in acidity, alcohol and sugar content, leads to the following conclusions: (1) Changes in total acidity, alcohol and sugar are independent of the starch content of the ensiled corn and of the silage produced from it. (2) The first intermediate products resulting from decomposition of starch are not present in demonstrable quantities. (3) The starch content remains constant throughout the fermentation process. (4) The starch granules remain intact, undergoing no physical change that can be detected by microscopic examination.

Water-soluble B vitamines: II. Are the antineuritic and the growth-promoting vitamines the same? A. D. EMMETT and MABEL STOCKHOLM. In previous work in feeding pigeons and young rats the same basal diet as the only source of watersoluble B vitamine, we found that the antineuritic vitamine (pigeons) and the growth-promoting (rats) were not the same. In further studies, carried out on yeast, rats and pigeons, it has been ascertained, by using the Williams quantitative yeast method, that the "vitamine" that stimulates growth in the yeast cell is not antineuritic, as has been claimed, but simply growth-promoting. Further, this "vitamine" apparently has very little if anything to do with the growth of the rat. Therefore, the water-soluble B vitamine appears to be much more complex than many have been led to believe. CHARLES L. PARSONS, Secretary

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1920

WILLIAM HENRY WELCH1

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

On this memorable and beautiful occasion I have the cherished honor of having been chosen to perform, as it were, the duties of chronicler, in order that we may all be led to review in our minds the successive steps by which our great leader and master rose to such high distinction and wrought the miracle of giving to medicine a new birth in this country; and in order, also, that our successors, lighting their lamps at the shrine of Pathology and studying the treasures which these precious volumes enclose, may catch a gleam of what manner of man he was who produced them, and by the vigor of his living example and the charm of a rare personality, as well as by the power of his spoken and written word, in the short span of a lifetime raised medicine in the United States from a beneficent art to an expanding science.

William Henry Welch was born in Norfolk, Connecticut, April 8, 1850. He was the son of William and Emeline (Collin) Welch. His father was a practising physician, as were four of his father's brothers. Moreover, a great grandfather and grandfather were also physicians. When about one year of age, William Henry's mother died; thereafter he was

1 An introduction to the collected papers and addresses of Dr. Welch, compiled in his honor on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, to be published in three volumes by the Johns Hopkins Press under the editorial supervision of a committee consisting of John J. Abel, Lewellys F. Barker, Frank Billings, Walter C. Burket, William T. Councilman, Harvey Cushing, John M. T. Finney, Simon Flexner, William S. Halsted, William H. Howell, John Howland, Henry M. Hurd, Henry Barton Jacobs, William W. Keen, Howard A. Kelly, William G. MacCallum, William J. Mayo, Ralph B. Seem, Winford H. Smith, William S. Thayer, J. Whitridge Williams, Hugh H. Young.

taken care of and brought 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 captain 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 Reverend Ira W. Pettibone, an uncle by marriage. Here he prepared for Yale College which he entered in 1866, in his sixteenth year, and from which he was graduated 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 medical 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 Physicians 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 chemistry in particular. This rather unconventional and solitary personality, who was not only chemist, but geologist, mineralogist and botanist as well, proved to be an inspiring teacher. At the Yale Medical School the professor of chemistry was George Frederic Barker, afterwards professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who was deeply interested at the time in organic chemistry and thus turned his pupil's attention to the writ

ings of Kekulé which were just then exerting a dominant influence on chemical thought. Within the year the student was mastering the concepts of Kekulé in the original German. The breadth of interest of the two able teachers 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 traditional and alluring career of private and consultative 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.

It was fated also that the two men who, each in his own although different way, were to influence the rise of pathology in the United States, should first come together in the chemical 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 college; but as in that day the two sets of students-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 lengthened was to prove secure against the many and insistent allurements and pecuniary rewards of medical practise.

The year of chemical study over, Welch returned definitely to his medical studies. It will aid us a little later in the understanding of the change about to be wrought in the pursuit of pathology-in the making of advances in which the then unsuspecting medical student was to play so large a part-if we pause to sketch in broad outline the kind of educa

tional discipline offered the medical student at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a leading institution, in the period embraced by the years 1872 to 1875.

In 1872, when Welch entered, the College of Physicians and Surgeons had been in operation for sixty-five years and led all its competitors in the number of its students and in teaching facilities. The college occupied a building of its own on Twenty-third Street, regarded as commodious, and was a part of Columbia University. The term of instruction had been extended from four to five months, and three instead of two sessions of attendance upon lectures were required for graduation. The precarious supply of material for dissection and for instruction in operative surgery and the method of obtaining it had been superseded and made fairly adequate by legal enactment. The courses in anatomy and to a less degree those in medical chemistry comprised the entire provision for objective or practical teaching, aside from the out-patient clinic at the college and the clinical lectures given at the New York and Bellevue Hospitals and the Almshouse. A voluntary course of lectures on pathological anatomy with demonstration of organs removed at autopsy was offered during the summer session by Francis Delafield.

While the preceptorial system was still in Vogue and the medical student was still expected to obtain the main part of his clinical training during the long interval between sessions, in the office and on the rounds of his preceptor, the few outstanding students could hope to enter Bellevue Hospital for an interne ship, which might begin even six months before graduation. But the didactic lecture, of which the instruction still chiefly consisted, was expected to fill the mind of the student with the medical lore of the day, while it served also to impress his imagination with the vigorous personality and high authority of the eminent teachers under whom he sat, in a manner now wholly foreign to the spirit of medical teaching.

But to the able, energetic and ambitious student the plan, imperfect as it was as an edu

cational discipline, admitted of a choice of subject and disposition of effort not contemplated in the system. And thus we find Welch in the early period of his medical studies enticed away from the lecture halls into the more alluring atmosphere of the dissecting room and very soon serving as prosector to the professors of anatomy.

With the curriculum as indicated, it is obvious that no opportunity existed to acquire thorough training in any subject, aside possibly from the grosser aspects of human anatomy. The provision for pathology was extremely meager. Although a chair of physiology and pathology, filled by Alonzo Clark, had been created in 1847, in the early seventies of the last century, pathology had not become an independent subject of teaching, but was attached to the chair of medicine, still, as it happened, under Dr. Clark, who had been transferred to the professorship of pathology and clinical medicine.

There is no reason to suppose that Clark treated pathology otherwise than by lectures, with perhaps at most the occasional use of specimens from the deadhouse. On the other hand, Francis Delafield, who had become adjunct professor of pathology and clinical medicine, was already studying assiduously with the microscope the pathological changes in the kidneys in Bright's disease and still other morbid processes, as viewed indeed from the standpoint of the new cellular pathology just struggling into the light. But of opportunity for the student himself to acquire even the rudiments of the technique of the microscopic study of the organs and tissues in health and disease, there was none. It was not, therefore, just at this juncture in Welch's history that his interest in pathology asserted itself.

A compelling circumstance was, however, imminent. Among the prizes offered to students was one provided by Dr. Seguin, then the professor of diseases of the nervous system, for the best report of his clinical and didactic lectures. It consisted of a Varick microscope fitted with superior French triplex lenses. This prize was won by Welch, and it

proved indeed to be the spark which ignited the tinder of his latent interest in pathology and caused it to burst into flame. Fortunately Welch now entered in October, 1874, upon his interneship at Bellevue Hospital, where this strongly aroused impulse was to find an abundant field for expression. He now also came more directly under Delafield's influence, and was thrown with the elder Janeway. Much of his time was spent in the deadhouse performing autopsies, first on his own and then on many other cases; and it is a remarkable tribute to his technical skill and acumen of observation, as well as felicity of description, that Delafield invited him to use his special book for recording the protocols of the postmortem examinations, and that he was made a curator of the Wood Museum attached to the hospital.

Although it was perhaps not clearly perceptible at the time, it now appears that the circumstances surrounding and thus acting upon the sensitive imagination of Welch, the student, were favorable to his development; for notwithstanding the poverty of material resources and of laboratory facilities of the era, he had the good fortune to come under the influence in the medical college of not a few men of remarkable mental vigor and attainments. Besides those already mentioned, there were on the faculty of the college in his day Dalton and Curtis in physiology, St. John and Chandler in chemistry, Edward Curtis in materia medica, Markoe in surgery, Sands and Sabine in anatomy and McLean in obstetrics; weekly clinical lectures were given by Willard Parker and T. Gaillard Thomas, the prestige of whose strong personalities and eminent careers in surgery and in obstetrics and gynecology respectively must have been potent forces. He was thrown as prosector into close association with Sabine and with the demonstrators of anatomy, John Curtis and McBurney. It was especially at the suggestion of Sabine that Welch wrote his graduating thesis upon goiter, which received the first prize, and in the preparation of which he familiarized himself with medical literature and bibliography at the New York

Hospital Library. At Bellevue Hospital his contacts with Delafield and with Janeway became numerous and close, the forerunner, as it chanced, of a relationship destined to become even more intimate and significant at a somewhat later period.

Moreover, the era in which the young student found himself was one of fundamental flux of belief brought about by the new cellular pathology and the discoveries of Pasteur just impending. Into this whirlpool of shifting ideas, which were to move in the next succeeding years with ever-increasing speed, Welch with his eager, open and responsive mind was thrown. That his imagination was powerfully stirred by the intellectual ferment of the time may be assumed. One circumstance is, however, quite clear: at this stage pathology as an independent career had not been seriously before his mind, nor was it so to present itself until a whole new set of experiences had been pressed through.

The year and a half's interneship over, Welch is about to take ship for what proved to be for him and us a great adventure. In April, 1876, in company with his friend and fellow townsman, Dr. Frederic S. Dennis, he sailed on the Cunarder Bothnia for Liverpool. From Liverpool he went to London, where he spent a few days, crossed the channel from Harwich to Rotterdam and made his way leisurely along the flowering Dutch and Belgian fields as the spring was passing into the mild early summer months, toward Strassburg, the first stopping place on the long but important road which was about to fascinate his view.

Welch's European experience begins with Waldeyer, the director of the Anatomical Institute in Strassburg, with whom he studied normal histology. This subject was of course taken up on account of its fundamental importance as a basis for pathological histology. But it is significant that the interest in chemistry, also as a foundation subject, which carried Welch to New Haven on the very threshold of entrance to his medical studies, had remained alive; hence part of his time