Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine by Powel H. Kazanjian (review)

In this recent addition to the Rutgers University Press series, Critical Issues in Health and Medicine, historian and medical researcher Powel H. Kazanjian analyzes the career of Frederick Novy, an influential American bacteriologist at the University of Michigan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novy is largely absent from histories of bacteriology from this era, which tend to focus on the practices of public health scientists and microbe hunters, rather than bacteriologists working in medical schools. Kazanjian argues that Novy's career was "distinctly different" from that of his public health colleagues and created an "enduring legacy for medical education, bacteriology, and American society." (15) In particular, Kazanjian demonstrates that Novy's career provides a useful example of how laboratory scientists in this era sought to reform American medicine.

Over the course of Novy's long association with the University of Michigan, spanning his undergraduate and graduate education and entire scientific career, Novy focused on basic scientific investigations of microbes. While many American bacteriologists in public health departments had applied European discoveries to practical pursuits, Kazanjian argues that Novy instead focused on the fundamental biology of microbes. In particular, Novy's contributions on microbial metabolism and respiration earned him great respect from other medical scientists. This marks one of Kazanjian's most important contributions to the history of American bacteriology, especially his analysis of the instruments that Novy designed in his pursuit of basic scientific questions.

Novy's approach to research, according to Kazanjian, also helped to legitimize bacteriology as a distinct discipline. As a founding member and fourth president of the Society of American Bacteriologists, Novy and his fellow presidents sought to liberate bacteriology from pathology. Novy enlarged the scope of the Society to include non-bacterial microbes, including protozoans. Kazanjian regards this as essential for the autonomy of the emerging discipline, as protozoan diseases were more typically studied at schools of tropical medicine, public health departments, or agricultural schools. Novy worked to bring them under the umbrella of bacteriologists, especially in medical schools, where researchers would ideally study disease-causing microbes as biological entities. This came to fruition at Michigan in 1902 when a separate Department of Bacteriology was created with Novy as its first professor.

Kazanjian's chapter on Novy's contribution to the modernization of the University of Michigan's medical school, under the direction of Dean Victor Vaughan, demonstrates how a school contemporary to the Johns Hopkins University helped to establish what would become the standards as described in the Flexner report. This chapter demonstrates Kazanjian's excellent use of the Novy Papers at the University of Michigan Archives. While it would have been useful to have more on Vaughan's contributions, Kazanjian persuasively shows that Novy was instrumental in this transformation, creating what Kazanjian argues was an institution on par with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Novy insisted on expanding the curriculum to include a year-long microbiology course with a laboratory component as early as 1889, for example. To accommodate laboratory work, Vaughan recommended increasing the MD degree from three to four years, a feat they accomplished in 1891. Though Novy certainly changed medical education at the University of Michigan, his legacy for medical education outside of the state is more difficult to assess. This is, perhaps, in part due to Novy's focus on research. Novy had no desire to become an institution builder outside of Ann Arbor or the Society for American Bacteriologists.

Novy did, however, seem to make a significant impact on his students. Delving into letters and celebratory remembrances written by Novy's students, Kazanjian argues that Novy instilled in his students the "spirit of research" and a deep, religious-like faith in the truth and power of science. For Novy, these were moral lessons as much as instruction in the scientific method. These lessons also served to encourage students to question the...