Patriarch of Pathology

Doctor Theobald Smith, one of the country's great pathologists and bacteriologists, last week ate a dinner in his own monument: a house overlooking Princeton University campus and Carnegie Lake. Professor Smith lived in the house with his family during the 15 years (1915-29) he was director of the Rockefeller Institute's department of animal pathology. He has retired now and remains in the neighborhood only as consultant. The Rockefeller Institute providently remodeled the house for use of its entire animal pathology staff and last week's dinner signified the transformation of home to monument. The building was dedicated as Theobald Smith House.

At the dinner, which was formal despite its professed informality, were Mr. & Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Dr. William Henry Welch of Johns Hopkins, and five dozen other notables. Mr. Rockefeller, at ease among intimate friends, recalled what a young man (27) he was when Drs. Smith, Flexner, Welch and others organized the Rockefeller Institute. Dr. Welch saluted Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Rockefeller, and other ladies present, with an old bachelor's old quip, forebore retelling his more jovial stories.

Dr. Theobald Smith is 72. With Dr. Welch, Dr. Flexner, Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly of Johns Hopkins and a very few more, he is one of those fortunates now alive who grew up with modern medicine. Amazing Louis Pasteur (1822-95) had scarcely proven that microbes cause disease, contentious Robert Koch (1843-1910) had scarcely demonstrated how to cultivate germs, when in 1884 Dr. Smith --who was then only 25, and the late Dr. Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850-1914) who was then 34-proposed creating immunity against disease with products of the bacteria which caused the disease. With this idea they immunized pigeons against hog cholera. Their method rationalized the whole subject of vaccination. It promptly led to the invention of diphtheria antitoxin.

Dr. Smith then worked for the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He gained a professorship at George Washington (then Columbian) University. In 1893 he demonstrated that the "Texas fever" which was destroying cattle herds in the Southwest was caused by a microbe which the cattle tick took from sick beasts, nourished and transmitted to well beasts. Thus he proved and established the great principle of insect-borne transmission of infection which led to the understanding of and intelligent aggression against yellow fever, malaria, typhus fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, and dozens of comparable diseases.

Ambitious President Charles William Eliot (1834-1926) of Harvard took Dr. Smith from George Washington University. At Harvard, Professor Smith showed that the bacillus which causes human tuberculosis is not the same bacillus which causes bovine tuberculosis. Children were frequently infected by the bovine type, through milk. Pasteurization of milk, that is, heating it as Pasteur heated wine to prevent spoilage, blocked that contamination. At Harvard he, among many other things, discovered serum sickness, which Paul Ehrlich called the Theobald Smithsche Phenomenon.

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was set up in 1901. Dr. Smith was on its first directordirectorate. But not until 1915 did he leave Harvard for the Institute's animal pathology research in Princeton. Princeton University, like half a dozen other universities, has given him an honorary degree, but he has never had formal connection with that institution except through his daughter Lilian Hilyer, who married Robert Franz Foerster, onetime Princeton professor of economics. Medical literature contains many articles by Dr. Smith. About him there exist in print only three brief accounts, and the Index Catalog of the Library of the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army gives one of them as Dr. Smith's obituary.

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