From the painting by E. Berenice, presented to the Buffalo Historical

Society by Grover Wende, M. D.

ERNEST WENDE: A MEMOIR1

BY ADELBERT MOOT

Dr. Ernest Wende was born July 23, 1853, and died in this city February 11, 1910, with an established international reputation as a master in the application of the principles of modern, scientific, preventive medicine to human life in a great city. Over thirteen years of his professional life he was the Health Commissioner of Buffalo, his first term beginning in 1892, and ending in July, 1902, and his second term beginning in 1907 and ending with his death in 1910.

When he first took office, under one of our most efficient and respected mayors, Charles Bishop, in 1892, under our revised charter, as the first health commissioner installed under it, he took office in a city in which up to that time the doctor appointed to take charge of medical matters in the city had always been appointed for political reasons, and the natural consequence was that the office had been treated more or less as a political sinecure. Because this had been so, in the revised charter it was provided that, for the munificent salary of $4,000 a year, the Health Commissioner was to give his whole time to the reorganized Health Department of the City of Buffalo. Had not the then Corporation Counsel officially advised the Mayor that the true construction of the full time condition did not require the appointed Health Commissioner to give up private practice altogether, but all that it required was that he should give the first place to the demands of his office,

1. Paper read at a meeting of the Buffalo Historical Society, Tuesday evening, April 18, 1916.

even if it should take his full time to discharge the duties of the office, so that there would be no time left to continue his private practice, it would have been impossible for Mayor Bishop to have obtained the consent of Dr. Ernest Wende, or any other first-class doctor, to become Health Commissioner; for Dr. Ernest Wende was seeking the appointment of another prominent doctor, and that prominent doctor was opposed by still another doctor, equally prominent, with such vigor that Mayor Bishop, with the assent of all concerned, except Dr. Wende, suggested that the appointment of Dr. Wende would end all factional differences in the medical profession, and would at the same time give the city a first-class, up-to-date Health Commissioner. At first, Dr. Wende strongly demurred to this suggestion, but ultimately the Mayor and his friends among the doctors from both sides finally induced him to withdraw his opposition and to consent to take the office, on the basis of the official full-time opinion of the Corporation Counsel, as stated.

While there has been a general appreciation of the wonderful preventive medical work done by Dr. Wende in his two terms of office, perhaps there has been no statement of it as a whole that has given an adequate view of the permanent results of putting this extraordinarily capable and efficient man and doctor into this office nearly twenty-five years ago. Few even of his professional brothers in this city realize that the almost revolutionary, but thoroughly scientific, methods he introduced into the office, the thoroughly non-political and efficient organization he made of it back in 1892, and the extraordinary vigor he then injected into it, have continued to dominate it, in the main, during all these years. It is unfortunately true that, for purely political reasons, he was not reappointed in 1902, although the best citizens of all parties urged his reappointment, and since his death, in recent years outside politicians and officials