William H. Howell:
Third Professor of Physiology at the University of Michigan (1889-1892)
H
enry Sewall recommended William H. Howell, his junior John Hopkins colleague, as his successor when has had to resign as professor of physiology on account of his tuberculosis in 1889. Starting from almost nothing, Sewall had gradually accumulated equipment for teaching and research. When Howell arrived in Ann Arbor he found five Du Bois-Reymond induction coils, two rotating cylinders with clockwork for smoked-paper recording, one Ludwig kymographion for registering blood pressure, a Browning spectrograph, a Thompson's galvanometer, a Roy-Gaskell heart tonometer, Zeiss microscopes, and machine and woodworking tools. With these Howell could mount a full demonThe William H. Howell Lab stration course in physiology for medical students and resume research. Like Sewall, Howell also gave a course in physiology for students in the Literary Department who intended to become teachers of biology or psychology, and for them a required laboratory course was provided. There is some evidence that laboratory work was also required for medical students in Howell’s third and last year at Michigan.
At Michigan Howell continued the work on hematopoiesis he had begun at Johns Hopkins. He found that in the early embryo red blood cells are formed in many tissues and in the second half of embryonic life in the liver, spleen, and bone marrow. After birth they are formed only in the bone marrow, but in profound anemia the spleen may resume production. The nucleus of the red blood cell is lost by extrusion, but in severely anemic animals a large fragment of nuclear material, now known as the Howell-Jolly body, persists until the cell disappears. Like Sewall, Howell had student assistants in his teaching and research. One Literary Department student and one medical student earned masters’ degrees helping him demonstrate that it is the inorganic salts of plasma, not the proteins, that maintain the beat of the heart. The medical student demonstrated that proteins are not consumed by the beating heart over a period of fourteen hours. Again working with students, Howell attempted to determine the nature of conduction by a cooled segment of nerve in a nerve-muscle preparation. In 1892 first-year medical students at Harvard were required to do one hundred laboratory exercises in physiology, and Henry P. Bowditch, professor of physiology at Harvard, needed help. He hired Howell away from Michigan, but he could keep him only a year. Newell Martin resigned just as the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine opened, and Howell returned to Johns Hopkins as its first professor of physiology. Much later at a festive occasion in Ann Arbor Howell said: “It is true that when I was called to another position I accepted, and severed my connections here in an easy and friendly way. I have since come to recognize that, so far as I was concerned, this separation was effected without proper consideration, for I have not found elsewhere better opportunities for work nor any pleasanter or more stimulating environment for living.” Source: Horace W. Davenport (1999) “Not Just any Medical: The Science, Practice, and Teaching of Medicine at the University of Michigan, 1850-1941”, University of Michigan Press, pages 61 and 62. •
Physiology Matters
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