Revisiting a “Great” Doctor’s Life

Reading Thomas Lee’s excellent and thoughtful book, Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, is a blast from the past—not just of American medicine but of the history of medicine. There was a time when almost all medical history was written by physicians about physicians. But a group of young medical historians writing in the 1970s and 1980s disapproved. In a famous essay entitled “Beyond the Great Doctors,”¹ Susan M. Reverby and David Rosner sought to use the tools of social history to study medicine’s past. Still, medical biography never really went away. Lee’s book is a useful opportunity to explore the virtues and limitations of “great doctor history.”

Biography was long a part of historical scholarship, but its appeal was particularly strong in medicine. Physicians, some of whom had retired from practice, wrote most of these biographies, generally based on doctors they had encountered during their careers. This scholarship reified two related ideas. First, doctors, through their achievements, essentially created the history of medicine; and second, the history of medicine was a march of progress in which new discoveries and knowledge replaced the ignorance of earlier eras. In this manner, the history of medicine was an excellent example of Whig history. Perhaps the best-known such biography was The Life of William Osler (1925), about the most famous physician of the early twentieth century. The author was Osler’s junior colleague, Harvey Cushing, himself a very accomplished neurosurgeon. The book—which essentially recounted Osler’s personal history, medical achievements, and philosophy—won the Pulitzer Prize.

It was this exact type of book that Reverby and Rosner found woefully lacking. The incessant focus on white male doctors, they argued, ignored a vast amount of information and experiences that could be culled from the “total” history of medicine. For example, biographers entirely excluded patients and their experiences of illness. True, these great physicians cared for the poor, but issues of class, race, and gender were invisible. Lastly, the implication of these books—that discoveries and insights by these doctors transformed medicine from a state of ignorance to wisdom—was incomplete and misleading. The degree to which these social historians sought to revolutionize the history of medicine may best be revealed by some of the chapter titles in the edited volume in which “Beyond the Great Doctors” appeared. They included “The Social Meaning of Personal Health: The Ladies’ Physiological Institute of Boston and Vicinity in the 1850s” and “The Loomis Trial: Social Mores and Obstetrics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.”² There were no “great doctors” to be found in the book.

That social history has come to dominate the history of medicine is clear from a glance at any program of the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine. Even physicians who present papers quote Charles Rosenberg or other prominent [Ph.D] medical historians and see physicians as social actors. In contrast, the American Osler Society remains a venue for more biographical studies of Osler and other doctors.

To be sure, Eugene Braunwald is a good subject for a biography. He is certainly among the most prominent and powerful physicians of the last fifty years, having achieved great renown as a researcher, educator, administrator, and clinician. Braunwald was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna in 1930, where his father was in the textile business. The Nazi Anschluss of March 1938 changed everything. The Braunwald business was liquidated and Braunwald’s father, William, was briefly taken into custody by the Nazis.

Fortunately, however, the family was able to escape. They went first to Switzerland, then to England, and then to Brooklyn.

Braunwald was a brilliant student. After attending a series of private schools, he went to New York University, where he matriculated in 1946 at the age of sixteen.

By this point, Braunwald knew he wanted to be a doctor. He worked exceptionally hard and got top grades. But his ability...