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3 Boston, 1880–1885 He wants to go to college more than any boy I ever knew, but I can’t afford to send him and do justice to the other children, so he must be content with something else.1 THANKS TO JESSE HASKELL, Len had a bent toward learning, a tendency hampered by his father’s endemic lack of funds. After Charles Wood died, Elijah Perry, his mother’s stepfather, introduced Len to H. H. Hunnewell, a Wellesley businessman who had underwritten the education of other deserving men, and Hunnewell agreed to help. Although the philanthropist typically made loans rather than outright grants, he later said that, of all the men he had helped, only Wood ever made any attempt to pay him back. Exactly how much Wood received is not recorded, but it was enough to let him enroll in Harvard Medical School in 1880.2 Medicine through the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century was more vocation than profession and often more cult than either; aspiring physicians rarely held baccalaureates, and a medical degree was the meager cousin to the Bachelor of Arts. Courses were generally taught by a faculty of practicing physicians who collected fees from the students and divided the proceeds. The curriculum was taught by lecture with only a few lucky students getting apprenticeships that afforded exposure to actual patients; most simply got practical experience on the job after graduation. A scattering of the better schools like Harvard were loosely affiliated with actual institutions of higher education, but, even in these, academic and financial control remained the jealously guarded province of the medical faculty.3 Reform in American medical education began in earnest when Charles Eliot was named Harvard president in 1869. A Boston Brahmin 10 trained in chemistry, Eliot made improvement of Harvard’s professional schools his pet project, and, in spite of vigorous opposition led by the curmudgeonly surgical icon Henry Bigelow, Eliot brought the medical school’s finances under university control and put its professors on salary. He increased the academic year from four to nine months and the total course from two to three years. Students, once required to pass only a majority of their courses, had to pass them all. Laboratory experience in physiology, chemistry, and pathological anatomy were added to the didactic schedule. Charles Jewett Wood learned medicine by apprenticeship and anecdote; his son would come to the profession in the vanguard of medical scientists.4 Wood arrived in Boston at 11 a.m. on October 1 and went directly to the medical school’s industrial brick building on North Grove Street for a physiology lecture he dismissed as “rather dry.”5 From that inauspicious beginning, he proceeded across the Commons to Dr. Reginald Fitz’s Back Bay office to purchase his matriculation card before he rented an attic room on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. His room was a short block from the Massachusetts General Hospital, was in sight of the Charles, and, to his relief, cost only $5.50 a week including board. By 1:00, Len was back at North Grove Street for an anatomy lecture by “Dr. Homes.” Witty, erudite Oliver Wendell Holmes was a perennial student favorite and Wood “liked his appearance very much.”6 Within the month Wood began “the dreary season of perpetual lectures , from morning till night, to large classes of more or less turbulent students.”7 Harvard medical students were subjected to five or six consecutive hours of lectures beginning at 7:00 a.m. and running through the lunch hour. The last class of the day was reserved for “Homes,” the only faculty member entertaining enough to hold the students’ attention late in the day. Holmes brought three things to his students that in- fluenced Wood’s future. First, he was an early proponent of the germ theory of disease. His 1843 article “Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” preceded Ignascz Semmelweiss’s classic description of the role of contamination by physicians’ hands in childbed fever by several years. Second , Holmes brought a microscope back from Paris and made it part of American medical education. Finally, he was one of the earliest opponents of the “heroic”American pharmacopeia with its purgatives, emetics , and poisonous mercurials, wryly informing his colleagues that, with few exceptions, their entire list of drugs could be thrown into the sea to the ultimate benefit of their patients and the detriment of the fish.8 BOSTON, 1880–1885 11 [18.118.195...

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