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20 Medical History for the General Reader
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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C H A P T E R T W E N T Y Medical History for the General Reader Sherwin B. Nuland The story of medicine is vital and inspiring, no matter from what angle you approach it. It is closely interwoven with the story of peoples, of civilizations, and of the human mind. It deals with great men and small men—with philosophers and scientists, with monarchs and ecclesiastics, with scoundrels and humbugs. On the one hand, it springs from folkways, legends, credulity, and superstition; on the other from intelligence, culture, labor, valor, and truth. And always it seems to reflect the character and progress of the people with whom for the time it is lodged—be they reactionary or be they progressive . Whatever else it is, the history of medicine is never dull. JAMES GREGORY MUMFORD, 1913 There was a time when purchasing a copy of Fielding Garrison’s classic, An Introduction to the History of Medicine,1 was among the first steps any fledgling devotee of the field would take as he embarked on his explorations. In those days, such acolytes included far more physicians than embryonic professional historians, of whom there were still very few. Garrison’s was not a book to be read from cover to cover. Most of its owners and borrowers probably used it as I did, which was to look up a thumb-nailed biography in a particular field or era and read the author’s entertaining and often idiosyncratic comments on his career and contributions—and not infrequently his personality. It was a spotty way to learn medical history, but the passages had the unique quality of piquing further interest, largely by the way its author was able, in a paragraph or two, to convey the individuality of each historical figure and his own enthusiasm for the topic. In time, the spots would begin to enlarge and finally coalesce, both those gleaned from Garrison and those many additional ones assembled from sources to which his attractive sentences led their readers. It was possible to acquire a workmanlike overview of the panorama of Medical History for the General Reader 451 medical history in this way, just by starting with a copy of An Introduction to the History of Medicine, a good light, and a comfortable chair. Like so many others did, between the publication in 1913 of the first of its four editions and the gradual decline in the book’s popularity after the early 1980s, I spent many an evening hour browsing in my Garrison. My well-worn copy of the 1929 final edition—which I bought brand-new, half a century after its publication—contains the famous preface familiar to several generations of readers like me, who first approached the field of medical history by using its pages as a guide. It is here that the epigraph to the present essay is to be found,2 quoted from a reviewer’s comments at the time of the book’s original appearance in 1913. This particular passage has always appealed to me, for several reasons: it was written by a clinical doctor, Mumford, without formal credentials as a historian; the clinical doctor was a surgeon at the Harvard medical school; the clinical doctor was himself the author of books and articles on the history of medicine meant for the general reader and physicians; and in one of his own earlier works, the clinical doctor had stated that his intent in writing the book was to ‘‘show to laymen as well as to physicians something of the meaning of medicine and of the life of its votaries.’’3 Except for the name of the school, all of these words might just as well be said of me. I might also have made a declaration that sounded remarkably like the one in the epigraph by that clinical doctor, James Gregory Mumford. Of course, Mumford ’s might be a statement just as well made of any variety of historiography, and that in itself tells a tale with a lesson. The lesson is that all history is intrinsically colorful, eminently readable, incomparably edifying, and has lessons vastly important for the general public to know—in a word, fascinating; in another word, instructive. Perhaps even more directly, the study of medical history is great fun. Medical history is knowledge to be shared. In contemplating the spectrum of formats in which it can be presented, one should not be misled into the error of thinking that...