Vaughan continued his studies at the medical school and received his
M.D. in 1878 as part of the last class to graduate from a 2-year curriculum before it became a 3-year program. He began a successful medical practice that lasted twenty years, but his primary interest remained in the laboratory. He was made an
assistant professor in 1880, and in 1883 received a
full professorship in physiological and pathological chemistry; he was the first to hold a chair of physiological chemistry—today known as biochemistry—in an American medical school.
Research Vaughan's research was primarily in the areas of
bacteriology and intoxication as the basis for disease, which he approached from a chemistry standpoint. He published over two hundred papers and books, and while many of his theories were later found to be incorrect, they were based on his experimental data.
Tyrotoxicons Hundreds of cases of food poisoning caused by cheeses hit Michigan between 1883 and 1885, though none were fatal. Vaughan evaporated an alcoholic extract of a suspect cheese and ate some himself, noting mouth dryness and constriction of his throat. He purified it and noted a drop placed on his tongue caused burning, nausea, bowel pain, and diarrhea; he repeated this test both on himself and student volunteers. Purifying the substance further resulted in needle-shaped crystals he named
tyrotoxicons. The name came from the Greek words for "cheese" and "poison", and he considered them to be a kind of
ptomaine, then thought to be a type of chemical that caused food poisoning. An ice cream poisoning incident the following year confirmed his suspicions. Vaughan and Novy published a book in 1886,
Ptomaines and Leucomaines, or the Putrefactive and Physiological Alkaloids, which grew to 604 pages by its third printing in 1896; this and numerous journal articles led to national attention for the university and recognition for Vaughan as a leading researcher on bacteriology. There were skeptics of the tyrotoxicon theory at the time, and the ptomaine theory itself began to lose credibility by the early 20th century, leading Vaughan to conclude in 1909 that, "practically nothing is known about the precise chemical nature of these bacterial poisons".
Nuclein Vaughan became convinced that germicidal properties of
serum was thanks to
nuclein. He extracted nuclein from the blood of dogs and rabbits and tested it on animals, and found it made some rabbits immune to tuberculosis. He had similar results with anthrax, though others pointed out his solution of anthrax was probably too weak to make it a valid experiment. He tested nuclein on patients in his private practice, finding it effective on tonsilitis and other ailments. He believed he found success with it in treating tuberculosis, although a number of patients died anyway. George Dock, who treated many tuberculosis patients, tried the therapy for a couple years but did not find it very effective, calling it "something of a fad". Detroit pharmaceutical company
Parke, Davis & Co., sold a nuclein therapy based on Vaughan's formulation from 1894 through at least 1913.
The Hygienic Laboratory The
germ theory of disease was not yet widely accepted in 1881 when Vaughan began teaching a new course he called
Sanitary Science. He later renamed it
Course on Hygiene and it covered topics such as
germs,
disease,
antiseptics,
quarantine, and
vaccinations. In 1884 he petitioned the regents to establish a State Laboratory of Hygiene, but the request was denied. Later that year,
Robert Koch published his
four postulates and the germ theory of disease began to take on importance worldwide. Vaughan repeated his request in 1886 and this time the regents approved it; the following year, they requested $75,000 (about $1.8 million in 2016 terms) from the
Michigan state legislature to fund the laboratory along with several other labs. After a lobbying effort by the university, professionals, pharmacists, and farmers, the legislature allocated $35,000 for the labs on June 24, 1887, and the university founded the Hygienic Laboratory, the first of its kind in the country. While the laboratory was being constructed in the summer of 1888, Vaughan and
Frederick George Novy went to Europe to study
bacteriology in Koch's laboratory in
Berlin. In addition to attending lectures, they purchased a complete set of Koch's laboratory equipment for the new lab in Ann Arbor. Before returning home, Vaughan visited the laboratory of
Louis Pasteur, where Novy had gone to take in additional study. The lab was completed in 1889 and moved to a larger space in 1903; until 1907 it served as the official public health laboratory for the state of Michigan. Master's and doctorate degrees in public health were added in 1911, and the lab itself evolved into a full department in 1902, eventually becoming the Department of Microbiology & Immunology in 1979.
Dean of the medical school Vaughan was named dean of the medical school in June 1891 following the resignation of Corydon Ford, though Vaughan had effectively been acting dean since the elderly Ford's appointment in 1887. Several recent deaths, resignations, and dismissals meant he needed to fill four professorships in short order. Vaughan wanted to find professors who could perform research in addition to their teaching duties, a change from previous expectations. Detroit doctor and university regent
Hermann Kiefer traveled with Vaughan to several eastern cities to find candidates. After a couple false starts, they hired George Dock away from the
University of Pennsylvania; Dock stayed on the faculty for nearly twenty years. Vaughan hired
John Jacob Abel in 1891 and, when he left in 1893 to join the just-opened medical school at
Johns Hopkins,
Arthur Cushny to replace him. Vaughan continued to build the faculty he wanted, and by the turn of the century it was considered as good as any school's in the country. Vaughan tightened admission requirements, only accepting students from high schools that had been certified by the University of Michigan or who had a comparable certificate from New York; it was still uncommon for students to have graduated from college before enrolling in the medical school. Starting in 1892, algebra, geometry, and French and German reading proficiency were all required skills. He expanded the curriculum from three years to four, in line with recent changes at
Harvard,
Columbia, and Penn. When it came to applicants, he was interested principally in academic qualifications and admitted both men and women. The number of
Jewish students greatly increased in his time, and he recruited
African-American students, which was very rare among white-dominated medical schools. He oversaw the opening of the university's first hospital in 1892, having testified before the legislature's appropriations committee several years previously to help secure the funds. The growing spread of rabies in Michigan beginning around 1900 prompted Vaughan to push for the establishment of a
Pasteur Institute branch in the state, which was the first in the U.S. west of New York. Towards the end of Vaughan's tenure, poor planning and neglect of the hospital meant it did not compare favorably to newer ones on the east coast. He proposed, unsuccessfully, moving the clinical portion of the medical program to Detroit. In 1916 the regents asked the legislature for money for a new hospital, and Vaughan testified in favor of it, but the money was not appropriated until 1920. The internal medicine and surgery departments had no permanent leadership, and all attempts to fill the former had failed. Vaughan hired
Hugh Cabot to lead the surgery department in 1919, and when Vaughan resigned in 1921, Cabot succeeded him.
Eugenics and sterilization In the 1910s, Vaughan gave lectures at the university on the subject of
eugenics. He believed that individuals exhibiting the "defective unit characters" of "alcoholism, feeblemindedness, epilepsy, insanity, pauperism and criminality" should be excluded from the "privilege ... of parenthood". He spoke in
Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914 at a statewide conference sponsored by the
Race Betterment Foundation, a center of the eugenics movement that had been co-founded by the cereal magnate
John Harvey Kellogg. Vaughan served on the organization's central committee, and was also serving as president of the state health board. The year before, he had endorsed a forced-sterilization law enacted by the Michigan state legislature; the law was challenged and thrown out as unconstitutional, though a similar law later passed in 1923 resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 3,000 people in the state. == Associations, publishing, and government work ==