WE OWE Edwards A. Park a large debt for the sketch of John Howland illustrated by anecdotes displaying his personality which he gave us in his John Howland address.
Howland was a New Englander to the core and a loyal son of Yale of the Class of '94. His medical career began in New York where, after 3 years as a student in New York University Medical School and a 2-year internship at the Presbyterian Hospital, he became associated with L. Emmett Holt, Sr. and decided to enter the then opening field of pediatrics. His fine abilities as a physician were rapidly recognized. He also began his investigative career in New York.
In the year 1910 at the age of 39 he was appointed Professor of Pediatrics at the Medical School of Washington University in St. Louis, which had just been reorganized on a full-time basis. He was disappointed by the inadequacy of the equipment there and unwilling to wait several years for the building of the projected new hospital. He resigned after 6 months and returned to New York.
This hiatus in his careen in academic medicine was a short one. In the year 1912 he was called to the chair of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Medical School to succeed Von Pirquet who had returned to Germany to accept the professorship at Breslau. This was a much coveted post. Also, I have been told, he was much aggrieved over having contracted trichinosis from eating Baltimore sausages.
During the 2 years that Von Pirquet was in Baltimore, the Department of Pediatrics had no quarters of its own and was obliged to use space borrowed from the Medical Outpatient.
Clinical Microscopy at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, United States of America