Background
John was born in New York City, in 1873, the son of Judge Henry E. Howland, a descendant of John Howland of the Mayflower company, and Sarah Louise Miller, of a well-known New York family. He spent his boyhood in New York City.
John was born in New York City, in 1873, the son of Judge Henry E. Howland, a descendant of John Howland of the Mayflower company, and Sarah Louise Miller, of a well-known New York family. He spent his boyhood in New York City.
He studied at the Cutler School and at King's School, Stamford, Connecticut, and was finally prepared for Yale at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating in 1890 and entering Yale in the class of 1894. At college he did not distinguish himself as a student but did distinguish himself in athletics and in the social life of the institution. Choosing a medical career, he entered the New York University Medical School, which still adhered to the three-year curriculum, and was awarded on his graduation in 1897 an internship at the Presbyterian Hospital, New York City, which he won in competitive examination.
In 1899 he became intern for a year at the New York Foundling Hospital and there came into contact with the most progressive and stimulating personality of the time in pediatrics in America, Luther Emmett Holt. Completing his service at the Foundling Hospital, Howland left for a year's study in Berlin, but soon abandoned Berlin for Vienna, where he took the regular courses in pathology and clinical medicine offered to Americans. On his return to the United States in 1901, he became Holt's assistant and thus definitely embarked on a pediatric career. He rose rapidly to a position of prominence as a practitioner and consultant and became a member of the visiting staff of the Babies Hospital, St. Vincent's Hospital, Willard Parker Hospital, as well as pathologist and assistant attending physician to the New York Foundling Hospital and instructor and associate in pediatrics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
In 1908 Howland was appointed head of the children's clinic at Bellevue Hospital, the most important post of the kind at the time in New York City. A lucrative practice and a great reputation as a consultant seemed assured. Such a career, however, was not his ambition. In 1910 he accepted a call to the professorship of pediatrics in the reorganized medical school of Washington University, St. Louis, and in preparation left for Europe for a year's study under one of the most distinguished pediatricians of the time, Czerny, in Strassburg. This year furnished him with the foundation of his ideas in infant feeding and in the nutritional disorders of infancy and the conception of what a modern pediatric clinic should be. Returning to America in 1911 he assumed his duties in St. Louis, but remained only one year. In 1912 he accepted a call to succeed Von Pirquet as professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and held that post until the time of his death.
Howland's scientific career began with the publication in 1904 of a study of the lesions of dysentery. At first his interests seem to have been mainly clinical and pathological but soon turned with the current of the time to the chemical aspects of disease. Among his most noteworthy contributions were those on the effects of chloroform poisoning on the liver, the measurement of the chemical and energy metabolism of sleeping children, the acidosis accompanying "intestinal intoxication" and numerous studies on infantile tetany and rickets.
His investigations in regard to diarrheal acidosis, tetany, and rickets represent his most important scientific work. Czerny had advanced the hypothesis that there was an acidosis associated with "intestinal intoxication. " Howland and Marriott, putting practical use to the conceptions of Lawrence Henderson, proved the existence of an acidosis in intestinal intoxication and showed that it was not an acetone body acidosis. In infantile tetany Howland and Marriott showed that the calcium of the blood was diminished, obtaining results identical with those which William G. MacCallum and Carl Voegtlin had previously shown were characteristic of tetany in the parathyro-idectomized animal, and made the treatment with calcium chloride an accepted procedure.
Howland's great contribution to rickets, in which Kramer also participated, was the discovery that the disease was characterized by a diminution of the inorganic phosphorus of the blood. The discovery by others that rickets could be produced in rats through varying the calcium and phosphorus in the diet led Howland and Kramer to advance the principle that the deposition of lime salts in the body is dependent upon a solubility product relationship between the calcium and phosphorus in the circulating fluids. With Edwards A. Park, Howland gave dramatic proof of the effectiveness of cod-liver oil in rickets. The last papers of Howland represent a study of the principles governing lime salt deposition in bones.
In 1903 he married Susan Morris Sanford of New Haven, Connecticut.