Knowledge in the Time of Cholera by Owen Whooley

Author:Owen Whooley [Whooley, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Some Welch rabbits, from the Wellcome Library, London.

Table 4.1. Welch’s network*

*This list is not intended to be exhaustive but rather illustrative of the extent of Welch’s influence. His network was vast, and I have identified only those individuals who rose to positions of prominence. Additionally, not all positions each individual held are listed here.

Welch was linked closely to another major U.S. reformer and a future director of the Rockefeller Institute, T. Mitchell Prudden. A possibly apocryphal story holds that when studying with Koch, both Welch and Prudden were warned by Koch not to bring cholera cultures back to the United States for fear of unleashing an epidemic. Unable to contain their excitement, the young doctors each stole a cholera culture from Koch’s lab. However, Welch and Prudden separately reconsidered the ramifications of transporting the bacillus to the United States, unintentionally running into each other on a Berlin bridge the night before their departure to dump their samples in a river (Fleming 1987, 76).7 True or not, this single tale involves four of the major players—Koch, Welch, Prudden, and cholera—in the bacteriological reform of American medicine.

The network first introduced the laboratory into public health. In an effort to turn back the ambivalence many regulars had developed toward the intellectual ecumenism of public health, allopathic bacteriological reformers hoped to use the prestige of laboratory science (Rosenkrantz 1974). Those leading this effort were rooted firmly in the U.S./German laboratory network. Hermann Biggs, a student of Welch’s at Bellevue who would later go on to head the Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection of the New York City Health Department, studied bacteriology in Germany, picking up additional bacteriological bona fides by studying with Pasteur in France. Biggs and Prudden would become the first public health officials to put Koch’s research to practical use, isolating the comma bacillus aboard a vessel in the port of New York in 1887. Through his actions in the health department, especially in combating diphtheria, Biggs became one of the most vocal advocates for bacteriological reform (Hammonds 1999). He remade the department along bacteriological lines, in an attempt to transform the laboratory into the obligatory passage point for all subsequent sanitary knowledge and interventions in New York. Other cities adopted this model (Jardine 1992).

Institutionalizing the laboratory in the United States would take great time and effort, but with this growing network, reformers had laid a foundation, culturally and organizationally, for a reformulation of allopathic medical epistemology. For these reformers, the new network meant more than a mere association with particular research or specific scientific figures; it highlighted their commitment to a new vision of medical knowledge centered on the laboratory. Under this new epistemology, the laboratory was not just another source of medical knowledge; it was to become the preeminent and privileged space for the development of that knowledge. Medical science would radiate outward from it. As such, the German program became synonymous with laboratory science, and laboratory science became synonymous with the future of medical science that the United States needed to embrace.

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