When McCormick made his controversial exit from Astoria, Hammond made a sound decision to appoint Joseph Howland Bill as medical officer in charge of the laboratory.1 Although he was young (twenty-six on February 9, 1863), and never a pharmacist by profession, Bill had the advantage of a broad scientific education for those times. A Philadelphian by birth and upbringing, he received a baccalaureate degree at Princeton in 1855, and served for a season as an aide to Henry Wurtz, the state chemist and mineralogist, during a mineralogical survey of New Jersey.2 When he began to prepare for a career in medicine, Bill studied in the office of his distinguished uncle, John Kearsley Mitchell, professor of surgery in the Jefferson Medical College, while he attended lectures at Jefferson. For clinical experience, Bill worked with his cousin, Silas Weir Mitchell, in the wards of a Philadelphia hospital. Professor Mitchell characterized his nephew as "an industrious student, of irreproachable character ... unusually accomplished in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, geology, etc."3