At Johns Hopkins

The world's highest medical tributes of last week went to two Johns Hopkins' medical men--William Henry Welch and William Holland Wilmer. To Dr. Wilmer the University dedicated the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute and to Dr. Welch the William H. Welch Medical Library. At the same time, the University inaugurated a Department of the History of Medicine and installed Dr. Welch as its head. Dr. Wilmer. William Holland Wil mer, 66, tall, blondish son of an Episcopal Bishop, is incontestably the greatest eye surgeon the U. S. has ever had.* Every U. S. President from Grover Cleveland on has needed eyeglasses, although they seldom were pictured wearing them. Dr. Wilmer has taken care of them all. Last week President Hoover telegraphed him congratulations on the dedication of the Institute. Secretary Mellon and his brother telegraphed him the promise of $30,000 for a research fellowship. Adolph Lewisohn, Manhattan banker, telegraphed another $30,000. Near Dr. and Mrs. Wilmer at the dedi cation ceremonies sat Mrs. Aida de Acosta Root Breckinridge, wife of Wilson's first Assistant Secretary of War. She raised the $4,000,000 which financed the Institute, because Dr. Wilmer saved her eyesight six years ago. Lacking the necessary millions herself, she coaxed Dr. Wilmers Negro office servant William to give her a list of rich former patients. There were 338 of them. All -- people like Mr. and Mrs. Breckinridge, Herbert Livingston Satterlee (Manhattan lawyer), Ira Clifton Copley (Illinois publisher), Mrs. Edith Oliver Rea (Pittsburgh iron and steel manufacturer), Joseph Pulitzer (whose father was blind), Daniel Willard (B. & O. R. R. president)--contributed handsomely. The Wilmer Institute with its professional staff and equipments outclasses any like organization in the U. S. and ranks equal to the great eye clinics at London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Vienna. Indeed, it surpasses them in having at its cooeperation the entire facilities of Johns Hopkins medical organization. Dr. Welch. One of Dr. Wilmer's patients is William Henry Welch, 79, son of a doctor--son of a doctor--son of a doctor. The profession considers that "no man now living in America has exerted greater influence upon the course of medical education in this country, and hence indirectly upon the course of medical thought and practice" than has Dr. Welch. Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876 on money bequeathed by Johns Hopkins (1794-1873), Quaker merchant of Baltimore. Hopkins left instructions for the development of first a hospital, then a medical school. The University's first president, Daniel Colt Oilman, went to Europe looking for a man who would be his first pathologist. European, savants told him to return to Manhattan and get William Henry Welch who, while practicing medicine there in a modest way, had become the U. S.'s outstanding pathologist. Dr. Welch went to Johns Hopkins in 1884 and inaugurated the first chair of pathology in America. When Johns Hopkins Hospital opened just 40 years ago, Dr. Welch had the great Howard Atwood Kelly and the late great William S. Halsted and William Osier join him as the original members of the staff. They headed the medical school faculty, when the school started in 1893, the first U. S. school with an immediate teaching hospital connection. The late great John Singer Sargent painted those four teachers in a group called The Four Doctors. Dr. Welch was their first dean at the Medical School. Most of the important pathologists in the U. S. have been his pupils as most of the important teachers of other branches of medicine have been theirs. Well nigh impossible it is to review the many accomplishments of Dr. Welch, to echo the gusto with which he still teaches. Suffice to report that in his doctorate cap and gown he resembles King Henry VIII in jolly mood, that he organized Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (1918), and now its Department of the History of Medicine and its Medical Library. As last week he walked with the applauding throng of notables,* through the library building, past a bust of himself and into the library's great hall, he paused near an ancient statuette of Asklepios and looked at Sargent's The Four Doctors hanging above the fireplace. And Osier again seemed to be saying to him as once before he said: "This is the stock in the soup."

*Professional opinion ranks next to him George Edmund de Schweinitz of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine. Dr. de Schweinitz, 71 this week, is also the son of a bishop, in the Moravian Church. *Including his great and good friend Karl Sudhoff, also 79, world's leading historian of medicine, who traveled from Leipzig for the ceremonies.