Editors' Note: Owsei Temkin's Centennial

It is with a mixture of special pride and sadness that we salute our friend, colleague, and teacher on what would have been his hundredth birthday, 6 October 2002. Dr. Temkin died less than 3 months short of this milestone, on 18 July 2002. (An obituary will appear in a future issue of the Bulletin.) Fortunately, he did live to celebrate the publication of his sixth book an even hundred years after his birth. (See Dr. Vivian Nutton's review of "On Second Thought" in this issue of the Bulletin.)

Seventy of Owsei Temkin's one hundred years were spent in Baltimore, in close association with The Johns Hopkins University and its medical school, where he was on the active faculty from 1932 to 1968. He directed the Institute of the History of Medicine for a decade (1958 to 1968) and edited the Bulletin for two decades (1948 to 1968). For more information and a detailed account of his first seventy-five years we refer you to his autobiographical essay, a thirty-five page introduction to The Double Face of Janus (1977). There his views of scholarship, of medicine, and of the history of medicine are readily evident. Clearly he was not "retired" in the last thirty-odd years, during which he published a much-revised and enlarged edition of his classic work on epilepsy, The Falling Sickness. In his time, he also produced Galenism, Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians, and now "On Second Thought."

Both medicine and the way we write and tell its history have seen immense changes in the Temkin century. These changes became ever-more-dramatic in his "retirement" years. But in reading his essays or conversing with him, it was very evident that his keen mind and playful sense of humor never retired. He continued to observe both the medical world around him and the changes in the universities and the world of scholarship.

In addition to his wisdom, vast knowledge, and ready laugh, part of his engaging charm was true modesty. As a person and as a scholar he had little to be modest about, yet he was sensitive to what he wrote a quarter-century ago in the preface to his first series of collected essays: "A publication of collected essays by their author is inherently an immodest undertaking."

Owsei's influence on us personally, on generations of students, and on many readers of his books and articles has been immense. For that gift we are all grateful, and we hail his birthday as a special day.