William Thomas Councilman

Artist: Leopold Seyffert; Oil on canvas

William Thomas Councilman was born on a farm near Baltimore, was the son of Dr. John T. Councilman, a rural physician. He went to local schools and he attended the St. Johns College in Annapolis. He left at age 16 and for the next six years “led an independent existence, raised side whiskers, considered himself a very ripe individual and did pretty much as he chose.”

At the age of 22, Councilman decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and entered medical school at the University of Maryland. Councilman then went to Johns Hopkins on a fellowship to work with the physiologist Henry Newell Martin in biology, studying the problems of elementary experimental physiology. 

After short periods of service at Baltimore’s Marine Hospital and Bayview Asylum, his main interest changed to histological pathology. In order to pursue this subject, Councilman in 1880 went to Europe for intensive training in pathology, working in Vienna under Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen.

Councilman returned to Baltimore in 1883, and helped John Shaw Billings (1838-1913) prepare his National Medical Dictionary, and performed autopsies at Bayview where he served as the coroner’s physician to the city. In 1886, he became an associate in pathology at Johns Hopkins, joining William Henry Welch and the early group of workers in the newly erected pathological laboratory which was to form a part of a great hospital, still in slow process of formation.

Councilman then spent another year in Europe before the opening of Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1892, he was appointed Shattuck professor of pathological anatomy at Harvard, the first outsider ever to be so appointed.

Councilman was widely honored. He was the principal founder and first president of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists, and in that capacity greatly stimulated the development of pathology in the United States.