Jonathan E. Rhoads, M.D.: Quaker Sense and Sensibility in the World of Surgery

Most biographies in medical history are tiresome and banal; some, however, are truly distinguished. Jonathan E. Rhoads falls into the latter category. Its authors are, respectively, a professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, and the former editor of the journal Cancer. Derived from archival materials and interviews with its subject, who is now emeritus professor of surgery, the book is a balanced portrayal of a leading surgeon of the twentieth century.

Jonathan Rhoads’s decision to study medicine clearly derived from the influence of his father, Edward Rhoads, who had taken a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1928, in time to benefit from the reforms in the medical curriculum adopted in the prior year (which included increased time for electives, and the opportunity to spend part of the senior year at another institution). Rhoads spent two months of his final year at Harvard, but while at Hopkins he benefited especially from exposure to the pathologist William MacCallum and the surgeon Dean DeWitt Lewis.

Upon graduation in 1932, Rhoads left for an internship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), where he would remain for the rest of his professional life. At HUP, he spent six months on the surgical service, coming into contact with three notable surgeons: Charles Harrison Frazier, Eldridge Eliason, and Isidor S. Ravdin. It was Ravdin who most impressed Rhoads, and it was under Ravdin that he took his surgical fellowship. There is no question that Ravdin proved an extraordinary mentor for Rhoads, and the success of his career can be traced to Ravdin’s example and continuing influence.

Remaining at HUP, Rhoads went on to a distinguished career as professor of surgery and long-term chairman of the Department of Surgery. His achievements in a period of surgical renaissance are noteworthy: he and his colleagues are credited with the discovery of total intravenous feeding; he was the first to use antibiotics in surgery, vitamin K to stop bleeding, and coumadin to stop clotting; he was among the first to use peritoneal dialysis for renal failure; and his efforts in the treatment of cancer and malnutrition remain extraordinary.

The authors do not discuss Rhoads’s 350 scientific publications in detail, or comment on his coeditorship of the influential Surgery: Principles and Practice (1957); for a celebratory view of these aspects of Rhoads’s work, the reader is referred to the festschrift edited by Clyde F. Barker and John M. Daly, Jonathan E. Rhoads: Eightieth Birthday Symposium, May 9, 1987 (1989).

This biography is not only a significant contribution to the history of a great figure in American medicine, but also a notable record of the changes in medical education and practice in which Rhoads played so important a role.