Great Town Character

Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly, 84, last of the four great physicians who headed Johns Hopkins Medical School's original faculty in 1889, died of heart disease last week. A few hours later the wife he married in Danzig in 1889, Laetitia Bredow, died in a coma at the same hospital. One of their nine children, Dr. Edmund Bredow Kelly, now somewhere in the Pacific with Hopkins Base Hospital Unit No. 18, is the only descendant bequeathed to medicine by any of Hopkins' famed Big Four.* His young grandson and namesake was killed in action in Africa Dec. 12, two days after he wrote the letter which appears on page 8.

Surgeon for Women. There was no law against practicing medicine without a license in Colorado in 1880 when young Howard Kelly, exhausted by studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School, spent a year's cowpunching vacation there, delivered a baby for the first time.

In 1882, Dr. Kelly began practice in Philadelphia. In two small rooms of a dingy frame house in a mill section, he opened a small hospital,/- performed abdominal operations so skillfully that other surgeons came to watch. After a year in Europe starting in 1886, the doctor was suggested by Dr. Osler for the Hopkins chairs of gynecology and obstetrics.

During the next 30 years he became known as one of the founders of gynecology. He took full advantage of new methods of anesthesia and antisepsis, performed seemingly impossible operations, wrote many textbooks. Two of his texts were beautifully illustrated by the late Max Broedel (TIME, March 14, 1938), whom Kelly imported from Germany and installed as head of a new Hopkins department on art in medicine. Modern surgical texts are studded with Kelly procedures.

When Dr. Kelly cured a woman of cancer with radium in 1904, he was called a quack. Years later his own cheeks were scarred where, with radium, the physician had healed himself. For the Howard A. Kelly Hospital, which he founded in 1892 next to his home on Eutaw Place, he acquired the world's largest private stock of radium--over $2,000,000 worth. Dr. Kelly remained an innovator into old age --in 1932 he wrote a book advocating electrosurgery. Paying tribute to him on his 75th birthday, Dr. Welch wrote from his deathbed: "You did more than any of us to extend the fame of the Hopkins to other parts."

Snakes of God. Outside of medicine, Episcopalian Dr. Kelly was such a bluenose that some thought him against "practically everything that is any fun." He opposed liquor, smoking, and drama which emphasized sex, violence or pie-throwing (pie-throwing gave children the wrong notion of humor). He would not hear of prophylactic stations to prevent venereal disease because it was the business of the churches to prevent exposure. He helped to have Baltimore brothels closed. He considered birth control a "certain mechanical meddling with married life which is abhorrent to me."

He was a Republican in Philadelphia, a Democrat in Baltimore, because "I always join the worst party to work from within to clean it up." In the 1895 election, when roughs were intimidating citizens waiting to vote by poking them with shoemakers' awls, small, stocky Dr. Kelly volunteered as a poll watcher, punched a plug-ugly in the nose.

No Hard-Shell Baptist was more fundamentalist than Episcopalian Kelly in the latter half of his life. He studied the Bible minutely, handed tracts of his own composition to acquaintances, used even the inevitable pink rose in his buttonhole as a starter for religious conversations. Said the Christian Herald: "He is a regular 'town character.' " Dr. Kelly found it an advantage in World War I when his chauffeur was drafted--it spurred the doctor to evangelize the taxi drivers with whom he rode, and the chauffeur's salary was added to the lavish Kelly charities.

Dr. Kelly predicted World War II because "we have made an idol of science and idols always slay their victims." He kept snakes as pets in his big Baltimore home, which was further cluttered with turtle shells, stuffed animals and birds. But for Dr. Kelly snakes were no part of scientific idolatry; they were a testimony of the Creator's powers. Snakes, he pointed out, are handless, legless, yet there are 2,000 kinds--"given a rod with a mouth and a vent, what could you or I do with such an idea in the way of creating a vast number of interesting varieties?"

*Professor of Medicine Sir William Osier, mourning the death of his only son in World War I, died in Britain in 1919; Surgeon William Stewart Halsted died childless in 1922; Pathologist William Henry Welch died a bachelor in 1934.

/-Its lineal descendant, Kensington Hospital for Women, still goes on with 66 beds, 35 bassinets.

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