Lessons from the 1918 flu: Are we investing in scientists and doctors we need now?

BY MICHAEL T. BENSON

MARCH 18, 2020 04:09 PM 

John Rowlett, Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine for Georgia Emergency Associates in Savannah, has deep ties to Eastern Kentucky University where his father served 42 years as a professor and vice president.

Dr. Rowlett gave me a copy of The Great Influenza by John Barry, a compelling chronicle of the 1918 Flu Epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans. He knew I would be interested given that the book opens with the founding of an institution, led by a man about whom I am currently writing a biography: Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of The Johns Hopkins University.

Gilman and his colleagues in Baltimore had a mission to build up the human capital to tackle society’s most intractable problems in their time -- including the flu epidemic.

In September 1876, Gilman—a Yale-trained geographer and librarian recruited away from the University of California where he served as its third president—invited renowned British scientist, Thomas Huxley, to address America’s first modern research university. Huxley, one of the world’s foremost biologists and later president of the Royal Society, stated: “The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”

The assembled crowd—and all those associated with The Hopkins, as it was called—were put on notice, as recounted by Barry, that in no other area did the U.S. lag behind the rest of the world as much as in its “study of the life sciences and medicine.”

Medical historian Thomas Bonner has estimated that between 1870 and 1914, 15,000 American doctors studied in Germany and Austria because they could not receive the proper training here. Gilman and his associates knew this and they were about to do something about it.

Gilman committed to recruiting the very best talent to confront the world’s most unrelenting challenges. The first physician he attracted to Baltimore in 1884 was William Welch, arguably the world’s leading pathologist. Dr. Welch then hired the faculty of the Hopkins Medical School which opened in 1893 with 18 students, 3 of whom were women.

Among Welch’s prodigious talents was his ability to recruit. And, at age 34, he made a capital selection of young, ambitious colleagues: William Osler (age 40), the most famous clinical physician of the modern era; William Halsted (age 37), considered a pioneer in surgical techniques and practices; and Howard Kelly (age 31), a gynecologist renowned for his advances in radiation therapy.

The Big Four, as they became known, even traveled to London in 1905 to have a larger-than-life group portrait done by John Singer Sargent, which still hangs today in the Welch Medical Library at Hopkins.

Another of Welch’s recruits was Franklin P. Mall, then at the University of Chicago, whose program and lab enjoyed the considerable backing of John D. Rockefeller. Welch refused to give up his pursuit; Mall finally relented and wired Welch: “Shall cast my lot with Hopkins. . . I consider you the greatest attraction. You make the opportunities.”

In addition to spearheading America’s response to the Flu Epidemic of 1918, Welch was also the founding dean of the Hopkins School of Public Health—the #1 ranked school in America. The Hopkins’ website, with its real-time tracking of the spread of COVID-19, is now getting 2 billion hits every single day.

So, then, who will be this century’s William Welch? Are we investing enough in our people—with the proper training, facilities, education, and experiences—to raise up those equipped to deal with global pandemics? Who will “make the opportunities” for the next generation? These questions are not rhetorical. The age in which we now live requires bold action as was taken by those before us. They did it then; we must do it now.

Michael T. Benson, president emeritus of Eastern Kentucky University, is visiting professor in the Department of the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University.

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