WELLS, HARRY GIDEON

(b. Fair Haven [now New Haven], Connecticut, 21 July 1875; d. Chicago, Illinois, 26 April 1943), pathology.

A distinguished teacher and investigator in chemical and general pathology, Wells was the son of Romanta Wells, a pharmacist. He graduated in 1895, from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, where he was particularly influenced by the biochemist Lafayette B. Mendel. He received the M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1898, became assistant there to the pathologist Ludvig Hektoen, and in 1901 entered the department of pathology of the University of Chicago, of which Hektoen, was titular chief. Wells was given a free hand in developing the department and was promoted through the ranks to full professor in 1913 and head of the department in 1932. In 1904-1905 he spent a fruitful year with Emil Fischer in Berlin.

Wells was a gifted teacher and a productive investigator, with a genius for succinct compilation of significant literature in his fields of interest. His widely diversified research led to his general acceptance as the country’ chief authority on chemical aspects of pathology and immunology, and Chemical Pathology (1907) went through five editions.

Like other pathologists Wells found a wealth of important subjects for research in his frequent postmortem examinations. His practice of engaging in personal research on problems about which he felt his knowledge was inadequate led him to studies on fat necrosis, resulting in a clear understanding of this condition; of tissue autolysis, and especially its relation to histological change in the cell nucleus in disease processes; of enzyme changes involved in cell autolysis; of pathological calcification (still recognized as among the country’s best studies); of fatty degeneration of the liver, in which his findings are basic to modern knowledge; and unusually productive investigations, in cooperation with Thomas B. Osborne, of the chemical composition of proteins as determined by immunological methods. With Maude Slye and other associates he carried out a long series of investigations of cancer, including its hereditary aspects, that now forms part of the background of this extensive field of medical research.

After 1911, concomitantly with his professorship, Wells was director of medical research at the Sprague Memorial Institute, a medical organization affiliated with the University of Chicago. During and after World War I he was Red Cross commissioner to Rumania, with heavy responsibilities for relief work in the Balkans.

In 1902 Wells married Bertha Robbins; their only son, Gideon R. Wells, became a practicing physician.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Wells’s writings include Chemical Pathology (Philadelphia, 1907; 5th ed., 1925); The Chemistry of Tuberculosis (Baltimore, 1923; 2nd ed., 1932), written with L. M. DeWitt and E. R. Long; and The Chemical Aspects of Immunity (New York, 1925; 2nd ed., 1929).

II. Secondary Literature. See P. R. Cannon, “H. Gideon Wells, M.D., Ph.D., 1875-1943,” in Archives of Pathology, 36 (1943), 331–334; and E. R. Long, “Biographical Memoir of Harry Gideon Wells, 1875-1943,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 26 (1950), 233–263.

Esmond R. Long