Background

William Henry Howell was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1860. He was the fourth child in a family of four sons and one daughter. Both his parents, George Henry and Virginia Teresa (Magruder) Howell, were of southern Maryland stock; his father operated a plastering business.

Education

Howell attended the public schools of Baltimore, and while at the City College (a high school) at the age of fifteen served as laboratory assistant to the teacher of physics and chemistry, who allowed him to carry on experiments of his own. Three years later (1878), intending to study medicine, he applied to President Daniel C. Gilman of the Johns Hopkins University for immediate admission to college without finishing his high school course. His request was granted, and he received the A. B. degree in 1881. Since the Johns Hopkins Medical School had not yet been opened, Howell enrolled as a doctoral candidate in biology under Henry Newell Martin, while also attending classes in anatomy and clinical medicine at the medical school of the University of Maryland. The influence, however, of Martin and association with the brilliant teachers and students at Johns Hopkins during these student days turned Howell to research in physiology instead of the study of medicine.

Before taking his doctorate in 1884 he was already engaged in important studies of the physiology of the heart, at first in association with Martin but later independently. Among five papers of his own written at this time, one, on the relation of the output of the heart to body weight, appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London while he was still a graduate student. His doctoral dissertation dealt with coagulation of the blood. European investigators had differed, in studying the transformation of the fluid protein fibrinogen to the insoluble fibrin of the clot, as to whether this conversion requires the presence of another protein (globulin) as well as an active agent of then unknown nature (thrombin). By working with the blood of the terrapin, which does not contain globulin, Howell excluded the need of globulin in the clotting process.

Career

Upon receiving his degree, Howell was appointed assistant professor of biology at Johns Hopkins and in 1888 was promoted to associate professor, teaching comparative anatomy and physiology. His students of this period, as of his later years, admired his calm, unassuming manner and absolute sincerity, as well as the remarkably clear and polished style of his lectures. Henry Newell Martin was now failing in health, and Howell carried an increasing burden of departmental administration, acquiring useful experience for his subsequent career but delaying his progress in experimental research.

In 1889 Howell went to the University of Michigan as lecturer in physiology and histology in its medical school. A year later he was made professor of these subjects. It is said that his laboratory course in physiology was the first such course to be required for all students in any medical school in the United States. Resuming his research, he published among other contributions one describing the particles in red blood cells now known as Howell-Jolly bodies. Another and more important discovery of this period was that of the importance of inorganic salts in maintaining the beat of the heart.

While at Ann Arbor he worked also, in association with G. Carl Huber, later professor of anatomy there, on a study of the degeneration of peripheral nerve fibers after severance of a nerve, in which various details of the degenerative process, now familiar, were carefully described. Howell's short stay of three years at Ann Arbor was followed by another, still more brief, at Harvard Medical School as associate professor of physiology under Henry P. Bowditch. This was cut short in 1892 when President Gilman of Johns Hopkins offered Howell the chair of physiology in the new Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was the only one of the distinguished group of preclinical professors Gilman gathered to start the school, including F. P. Mall, William H. Welch, and John J. Abel, who had not received his training partly in German universities.

He spent the rest of his life in Baltimore, in constantly productive research, teaching, and administration. Most of Howell's publications after 1892 deal with the physiology and pathology of the blood. In this field of research he became an internationally recognized authority, bringing to it not only broad biological experience but also command of the biochemical methods then available for working with the highly complex and little-understood ingredients of blood plasma, serum, and clots. In particular, he devoted much time and energy, after 1909, to the difficult problem of clotting, which he had begun to study while a graduate student. Although he did not reach a final solution of the way by which several ingredients of blood and tissue fluid combine to form a clot, his researches and hypotheses, published in a long series of contributions ended only by his death, were constantly stimulating to other workers in the field.

Notable among his discoveries were those establishing the role of phosphatides, especially cephalin, in the process ofclotting. About 1916 Howell assigned to a medical student, Jay McLean, the project of extracting from heart and liver tissues certain substances, presumably phosphatides, which in crude form were known to facilitate clotting. Actually McLean's experiments yielded a substance that retards clotting. Following this clue, with another of his students, L. Emmett Holt, Jr. , Howell by skillful chemical procedures secured a purified substance having powerful anticoagulant action. This substance he named "heparin" because he found it in large amounts in the liver. After further purification, heparin has become very useful in preventing clotting in blood transfusions and in operations upon blood vessels, and in limiting the extension of clots already existing in the blood vessels, as in coronary thrombosis and similar obstructions elsewhere.

Never closely confining himself to one field of research, Howell interspersed among his studies of the blood numerous investigations of other problems. One of these dealt with the pituitary gland; he was apparently the first to suggest (1897) that the two lobes of this gland are different in their endocrine function, the posterior lobe alone producing a substance (pituitrin) that causes contraction of blood vessels. In the early 1890's physiological research and teaching in the United States had advanced sufficiently to call for a collaborative textbook. Howell was chosen to edit it and brought out in 1896 the first edition of An American Textbook of Physiology and in 1900 a second edition. Shortly thereafter he began to write his own Text-book of Physiology for Medical Students and Physicians, first published in 1905. The clarity, balance, and thorough coverage of this work won it the prompt and enduring approval of teachers and students in practically all the American medical schools.

During Howell's lifetime it went through fourteen editions; after his death it was carried on by a group of younger physiologists. The success of the textbook imposed upon its author the heavy burden of keeping it up to date by successive revisions as current progress demanded. This labor, carried out largely during summer vacations, did not prevent Howell from continuing his investigations while carrying on much of the teaching in his department. He was in the student laboratory at every triweekly session, and lectured regularly. His lectures, though delivered without notes, were so perfectly worded that they could have gone directly to the printer, so thorough and yet so effortlessly presented as almost to spare his hearers the need to wrestle mentally with the subject under discussion. They were accompanied, whenever possible, by faultless lecture-table experiments. In the laboratory the medical students found him a friendly, careful instructor, not so provocative intellectually, perhaps, as some of his less polished colleagues; but to older men who joined him in research or sought his advice on problems of their own he was a stimulating leader. Two who worked with him closely, Joseph Erlanger and George H. Whipple, received the Nobel Prize.

At the peak of his career as investigator, teacher, and author, Howell accepted in 1899 the deanship of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as successor to William H. Welch. In his outwardly calm, unhurried way he conducted the dean's office to the satisfaction of faculty, colleagues, and students, while the school and its affiliated Johns Hopkins Hospital grew larger and more complicated. The added burdens, however, caused Howell chronic gastric difficulties which forced him to resign the deanship in 1911, while retaining his professorship and research activities. Portraits made at this time show the strain of overwork and ill health upon his kindly, thoughtful countenance. Howell's executive services to the Johns Hopkins University were, however, by no means over.

When the university's School of Hygiene and Public Health was organized in 1916, Welch, who headed it, appointed Howell assistant director and, the next year, professor of physiology (at which time he left the medical school). Howell effectively organized the teaching of physiology in the new school, different in many ways from that of the medical school. On Welch's retirement in 1925 he became its director, holding that post until his own retirement in 1931 at the age of seventy.

Howell was influential as scientist and leader of scientific affairs outside as well as within the university. In 1929 he was president of the first international congress of physiology held in the Americas. After his retirement from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene, Howell served for two years as an officer of the National Research Council, at first as chairman of the Division of Medical Research and later as chairman of the Council. In his last years he devoted himself to continuing revision of his celebrated textbook and to research in a laboratory provided by the university. He died in Baltimore shortly before his eighty-fifth birthday of a coronary occlusion sustained in the laboratory.

Achievements

• William Henry Howell pioneered the use of heparin as a blood anti-coagulant. His honors included degrees from Michigan, Yale, and the University of Edinburgh.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Directions for Laboratory Work in Physiology: For the Use of the Medical Classes at the University of Michigan (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Directions for Laboratory Work in Physiology...)

  • Vision

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Dissection of the Dog: As a Basis for the Study of Physiology

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • A Text-Book of Physiology: For Medical Students and Physicians

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Politics

Howell was an Episcopalian in religious affiliation.

Membership

He was a charter member of the American Physiological Society, a member of its council for twenty-two years, and its fourth president, serving for five terms (1905 - 09). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1903 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1905.

Connections

Howell married, on June 15, 1887, Anne Janet Tucker of Baltimore. They had three children: Janet Tucker, Roger, and Charlotte Teresa. The elder daughter, Janet Howell Clark, became professor of biophysics and dean of the college for women of the University of Rochester; Roger Howell became dean of the law school of the University of Maryland.

Father:

George Henry Howell

Mother:

Virginia Teresa (Magruder) Howell

Spouse:

Anne Janet Tucker

Daughter:

Charlotte Teresa Howell

Daughter:

Janet Tucker Howell

Son:

Roger Howell