Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today's Medicine (review)

In the postface to his 1931 classic, The Great Doctors, Henry Sigerist said of the ongoing march of medical progress that "[t]he tempo of evolution has slackened a little as compared with that of a few decades back."¹ Within some fifteen years, penicillin was ready for widespread clinical use, and the "tempo of evolution" had once more picked up. The real accelerando began in the years soon after Sigerist's death in 1957, and seems not yet to have reached its peak. As a result, numerous names have been added to the catalog of greatness. It is time to catch up, which was very likely foremost in the mind of John Galbraith Simmons when he conceived of his eminently useful Doctors and Discoveries.

This choice of the word "useful" is by no means meant to damn with faint praise—quite the opposite. The same can be said of Sigerist's book, which has served several generations of general readers and medical students as the ideal means by which to learn about the lives and contributions of physicians whose names have become familiar through frequent reference in commonly read literature. Hippocrates, Galen, Harvey, Sydenham, Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Ehrlich—both Sigerist and Simmons bring them all to life in just a few pages of succinct and readable biography. Sigerist's second edition stopped at Osler, and now Simmons brings us up to date, with such as Edelman, Varmus, Montagnier, and Vogelstein joining the distinguished group. We are provided with brief endnotes and an index as well, which is more than Sigerist gave us. The present author's stated aim is to "engage anyone interested in knowing something about the people who created the medical universe with which most of us are familiar" (p. xix), and he succeeds admirably in fulfilling this promise. Given the usual idiosyncrasies of any author's choices, this book leaves a reader "knowing something about" virtually every crucial contributor since Hippocrates.

Simmons has not written a book for historians, but he has accomplished something that many contemporary historians have nevertheless thought they might one day undertake. Some have actually tried it, and the attempt has also been made by a few with no official credentials of professionalism, but considerable self-attained knowledge. A quick glance at my shelves reveals a half-dozen such books, none as complete or comprehensive as the one Simmons has produced. His is the only text I have seen that is so similar in scope, style, and quality to that of Sigerist that it might present itself—though its author makes no such claim—as a worthy successor. Some years ago I set my hand to writing a similar book, and decided early in the work that a long essay on each of just a few discoverers was more my style. But Simmons has made the job look deceptively easy, which I can assure you it is not.

Of course, the inevitable small errors can be found in a volume with such a wide range of characters and contributions, and some of them will make a specialist reader wince because the information presented in this book is otherwise so reliable. It will be pointed out, no doubt, that the function of the venous valves is not "helping to pump blood back to the heart" (p. 46); Harvey Cushing was found at autopsy to have a one-centimeter colloid cyst in his third ventricle, and not a brain tumor (p. 231); the jejunem is not "the midportion of the small intestine" (p. 171); the congressional grant intended for the proven discoverer of inhalation anesthesia was $100,000, hardly "a small monetary reward" (p. 160) in the mid-nineteenth century. But the only real whopper I found is in the introduction, where Joseph Lister is said to have...