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  • Title: John Whitridge Williams' contribution to democracy abroad. (The fetus treated as a patient).
    Author: Vasicka A.
    Journal: Ceska Gynekol; 1999 Apr; 64(2):118-25. PubMed ID: 10510556.
    Abstract:
    The idealism of American pioneers was a driving force in the development of science, democracy, and sociology in the United States. It also served as a model for the development of new democracies abroad. The first American grafted democracy was established in Czechoslovakia in 1918, under Thomas Garrigue Masaryk as President. As a former professor of philosophy, at Charles University in Prague, he built the foundation of Czechoslovakian democracy on the historical principles of Jan Hus' search for the truth (1415), Jan Amos Komensky's use of Science and Humanism (1630), and on the values of American democracy as he conceived it from multiple visits to the United States and from the practical philosophy of his American wife. His major educational means was the use of science. He became a founder of political science. As president he recognized, that democracy, as a state form, does not educate people, they educate themselves through family, school, church, physician and life experience. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, on the eve of the opening of John Hopkin's University Hospital, a young American scientist by the name John Whitridge Williams came to Prague, Vienna, and other Europeans cities for the purpose of studying scientific obstetrics. He believed in the power of the truth in the power of the truth equally as Masaryk did and used science uncompromisingly in his speciality. He became the founder of American scientific obstetrics. He was shy of political science and ethnic problems. There was no personal connection between Masaryk and Williams. In 1903, John Whitridge Williams published his review of European and American obstetrics: he abolished the craft of obstetrics and worked the science of physiology and pathology into the practice of obstetrics. For Czechoslovaks the political democracy coming out of America through Masaryk was attractive, but of particular interest was native and personal democracy of Americans as a way of life. John Whitridge Williams' book contributed to European families, even though only through obstetricians, the knowledge about American pioneering, optimism, humanism, and a sense of freedom Williams considered the fetus as a patient and thought of education of the physician and patient of equal and fundamental importance: the mother was to participate in the process and the physician to understand the process. He himself understood feto-placental circulation, maternal metabolism, and the need of maternal participation on fetal development. He commanded physicians' respect of the patient and committed the obstetrician to the life long study of his patients. He considered research inseparable from intelligent care, and his book a guide of how and what to study, not a manual of procedures. Williams' greatest contribution to mankind was abolishing the craft of obstetrics and replacing it by sciences that brought to obstetrics humanism, selflessness, and knowledge. He was the first physician in the history of obstetrics who achieved a balance of science and humanism. The second contribution, of equal importance, was his undertaking a scientific review of European and American obstetrics which served the world as a window of the values of America's pioneer civilization. It made obstetrics a scientific discipline, attracted innumerable new students abroad, and through them promoted American democracy in their relations with patients. Williams' impact on European society was considerable. However, subtle at first, it was not included in the literature. He did not participate personally in the establishment of democracy in Czechoslovakia, but strengthened Masaryk's teaching programs through those Czechoslovakian obstetricians who adapted his scientific teachings and made him a model of American democracy as a view on life. Masaryk himself had in his presidential emblem a sign, veritas vincit, and through it, he accomplished twenty years of the most extraordinary democracy in the world.
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