The Four

This painting of The Four Doctors by John Singer Sargent, 1985 (from Wikipedia, in the public domain) shows the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. It's interesting because medicine is steeped in history, and yet we only get bits and pieces in our education. How many of us can name those four physicians? None, I wager (unless you go to Johns Hopkins). But if I mention that one of them created the first residency program, named a finding in bacterial endocarditis, and is part of a 3-name eponym for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, you might guess Sir William Osler. And if I proposed that the second championed aseptic surgical technique, came up with the radical mastectomy, and participated in the first use of anesthesia, you might remember William Halsted. The third made gynecology a real specialty and has a clamp named after him - Howard Kelly. The final, and hardest to identify, was the first dean of Johns Hopkins, created the public health school, discovered Clostridium perfringens, and has a road at Stanford named after him - yes, Welch road is named after William Welch, professor of pathology.