Alfred Stille

Alfred Stillé (October 30, 1813 – September 24, 1900) was an American physician. Born in Philadelphia, he studied classics at Yale, but was expelled for participating in the Conic Sections Rebellion. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the same year, where he received an A.B. degree in 1832. He went on to get an A.M. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1835 and in 1836 an M.D. from the school's department of medicine. He settled to practice in his native city, but spent parts of 1841 and 1851 in Paris and Vienna. From 1854 to 1859 he was professor of medicine at the Pennsylvania Medical College and from 1864 to 1884 at the University of Pennsylvania, later becoming its Chair. Stillé was one of the first in America to distinguish between typhus and typhoid fever. His observations in this connection he made during a typhus epidemic in Philadelphia in 1836 and reported in 1838. He acquired a great reputation as a practitioner, teacher, and writer, and was the first secretary, and in 1871–72 the president, of the American Medical Association. However, as evidenced by his later writings, he was also known for refusing to accept the germ theory or laboratory medicine.