Jerome J. Bylebyl: An Appreciation

A sage observed that a true scholar is someone who if placed on a desert island devoid of books or other scholarly materials could still advance our understanding of the world. Jerome Joseph Bylebyl was just such a scholar, whose mind could thrive in a material vacuum.

The son of Laura and Dr. Harry J. Bylebyl, Jerry grew up in western New York (not "Upstate," as he liked to caution the careless), in Buffalo; his family was also from North Tonawanda. He came from a Polish heritage that he acknowledged with pride, including choosing his assistant in Baltimore partly because she too was Polish. He attended Canisius High School in Buffalo and then Boston College, graduating summa cum laude in both biology and history in 1965. While tempted to follow his father, a surgeon, into medicine, he was keenly interested in medieval history; his college mentors suggested rather history of medicine, a happy mixture of his two interests. This led him to Yale University and the gentle tutelage of Leonard Wilson and the late Larry Holmes. He later recalled to me that because of his fascination with the Middle Ages, he wrote a term paper on "red matter," a healing substance with magical elements. But he eventually succumbed to the wiles of William Harvey, completing a thesis, Cardiovascular Physiology in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, in 1969. Upon its release, Jerry's dissertation was hailed as the most seminal work yet written about the "discoverer" of circulation. In his final year in graduate school, he became a lecturer and upon graduation was promoted to assistant professor.

In 1970, Jerry spent the year as a research associate at University College London in the Department of History of Medicine, where he drew closer to Walter Pagel, publishing an article with him on Galen in 1971. Returning to the States that same year he moved to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in the Department of History. There he supervised the dissertation of Michael Walton on fifteenth-century English medicine. In his last year at Chicago, he was also a fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, moving there as an assistant professor, both in the history of medicine and in the history of science in 1976. He was promoted to associate professor in 1979. Upon the death of Lloyd Stevenson, he served as acting director of the Institute from 1983 to 1984, and then as director of graduate studies from 1984 to 1991 under Gert Brieger. In Baltimore, he had two more doctoral students of medieval medicine: me, and William Henry York.

During my years at the Institute, starting in 1988, Jerry and I had a one-on-one tutorial covering antiquity to the eighteenth century, which was one of the most wide-ranging intellectual experiences I've ever had. Beyond our formal class work I sat in on his lectures to the medical students where he engaged a wide range of subjects, illustrated by a polymathic approach to slides as well as a famous film of trepanation. One waggish student in an online rating of professors later caviled that he was not entertaining enough, but that he certainly knew what he was talking about. A generation of Hopkins students heard history of medicine from a true master whom they may never have appreciated.

In 1990, Jerry became co-editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, a post he held until this year. He also served on the editorial boards of ISIS, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Journal of the History of Biology, and Studies in History of Biology. In the American Association for the History of Medicine he served on a variety of committees, chairing several, and he was also a member of Council.

He edited two books, William Harvey and His Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) and Teaching the History of Medicine at a Medical Center (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). But the range of Jerry's scholarship is suggested best by...