The Atlantic Seaboard


   Bacteriologists sometimes fail to give adequate credit to pathologists.
 Morgagni (1662-I 771), father of pathology and author of the famous
 work Sites and Causes of Disease, and later Virchow and his followers
 began the overthrow of the doctrine that only one disease, fever, exists
 by demonstrating specific lesions in various diseases.
   Although we quite properly think of William Welch and his associ-
 ate, T. Mitchell Prudden, chiefly as pathologists, they were active in
 New York in their early days as proponents of the new approach to
 pathology, the specific microbic origin of infectious diseases. We have
 already given an all too brief account of Welch and his contributions in
 the Hopkins-Baltimore section. His colleague, Prudden, somewhat hesi-
 tantly gave up a life in general practice and accepted the minor opening
 at the College of Physicians and Surgeons to begin a career of influence
 in pathology and bacteriology. The first laboratory was a space with "a
 narrow store on one side and a harness shop on the other." Here and
 later in the new building on Fifty-ninth Street, Prudden worked and
 grew in wisdom. We, in the richly equipped laboratories of today,
 can with difficulty imagine the working conditions and the meager
 support provided in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The annual
 director's report usually ended with this statement: "on the basis
of
 last year's returns, there is this year a deficit of $777.38 which, accord-
 ing to present arrangements, is very simply made up by a deduction of
 that amount from the salary of the Director [Dr. Prudden].''4
   Prudden was a shy, sensitive man, an aristocrat in his personal habits,
exemplifying the puritanical virtues and rarely unbending to his stu-
dents; like Welch, he remained a bachelor. In his early days he did an
immense amount of diagnostic and routine investigation. Among his
students who later pursued bacteriology successfully, we should men-
tion Hermann Biggs, Philip H. Hiss, William H. Park, George A.
Soper, Augustus Wadsworth, and Hans Zinsser.
  As did all but two or three of our early bacteriologists, Prudden
commonly followed trails already blazed by European scientists. It was
necessary to demonstrate and to persuade both himself and others that
invisible microbes were the primary exciting agents in tuberculosis,
diphtheria, typhoid fever, and other infectious diseases. Most of his
published papers were on strictly pathological themes; his Textbook of
Pathology (with Delafield) went through many editions from 1885 on,
eleven under his own lucid mind. Dr. Prudden described himself as "a
slave to teaching and to keeping the breath of life in a textbook in


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