My Aunt Marjorie always wanted me to become a medical doctor, but the aspect did not interest me in the least. (However, I am told that at the age of seven, my Uncle Malcolm interupted an anatomy lesson I was conducting with the help of a neighborhood young lady.. but that is a story for the "sex" topic in my "Joe Reads the News" blog.)
I always had a great deal of respect medical doctors, and especially for Doctor Mindus, who cured me of many a bad cold or sore throat. The good doctor was a refugee from Hitler's Germany and had survived life, such as it was, in one of the concentration camps. We were an extremely poor family, recovering from the Great Depression.. I hope we had enough money to pay Doctor Mindus for all the "house calls" he made. My family loved his "bedside manner" regardless of his thick Germanic accent.
But, last week, I gained even more respect for the medical profession, thanks to Professor Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., Yale School of Medicine. Doctor Nuland is the narrator of the course:
Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography.
This is one of the "Great Courses" published by The Teaching Company. It consists of 6 CD's containing 12 lessons of from 30 to 45 minutes each. I was able to listen to the whole course in my car while I drove to my weekly appointments. (None of which surprisingly were with Medical Doctors that week.) A few times, I just sat there in my parked car finishing a lesson.
When I finished the course, I had a renewed appreciation for the area I live in: Baltimore, Maryland. The reason will become clear as I work my way through an outline of the course.
Dr. Nuland is a fantastic story-teller. He picked twelve of the pioneers in medicine and told remarkable stories about each of them. These stories were so interesting to me that I hope to search the library for more details about their lives. Let me list each person and their accomplishments.
01.
Hippocrates. Born 460 B.C.E. (Before the Current Era) on the island of Cos, in Greece. He and his followers were able to separate medicine from religion or superstition, stress observation of the whole body, and not restrict treatment to just one small part of it. Hippocrates was called the "father of medicine" and all doctors try to follow his rule: "Do no harm!"
02.
Galen. Born 130 C.E. (Current Era) in Pergamon, Asia Minor. He insisted that doctors should know how the body works. However, to teach this, he did not operate on human cadavers, but instead on animals. But animals are not exactly just like humans on the inside, and some misconceptions were taught. He did make some useful observations, such as: arteries contain blood and the pulse is related to the heartbeat. Galen believed in predestination and felt that what he taught was all that the Demiurge required, or that could ever be discovered. His views were not often questioned, and lasted for about 15 centuries.
03.
Andreas Vesalius, born 1514 in Belgium. Vesalius found errors in Galen's work and set about writing a famous book:
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body). He was only 28 years old at the time. The book told how one could do one's own dissections.. not on animals, but on cadavers.. a big breakthrough. His book was wonderfully illustrated by a young apprentice to Titian, Stephan van Calcar. This book clarified the understanding of anatomy in new and unthoughtof ways.
04.
William Harvey was born in 1578 in Kent, England. He conducted experiments that showed that the heart is a pump and that blood circulates. In 1628, he published:
De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus: Anatomical Studies on the Motion of the Heart and the Blood in Animals.
05.
Giovanni Battista Morgagni, born 1682 in Italy. Morgagni as a young man, had the idea of keeping track of lots of patients' illnesses and then dissecting them after they died. Finally, after doing so, for 55 years (!) he published a book outlining 700 of these dissections and the diseases that the cadavers had succombed to. His book,
De sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomen Indigatis: On the Seats and Causes of Disease as Indicated by Anatomy, published in 1761, is still read (with pleasure I'm told) by today's doctors.
Morgagni is also credited with rediscovering the appendix (Leonardo had identified it in 1505). (Doctor Mindus is credited with recognising that I had appencitis and got me to the hospital in time to save my life. Incidentally, I had one of the smallest incisions in the 1940's, and pictures were taken of it, which appeared in some medical book or other at the time.)
06.
John Hunter, born in 1728 in Scotland. Hunter was interested in everything.. a veritable Mensa member before such people were identified. Once, he cut his Achilles tendon and then cut the tendons of every unfortunate animal he could get his hands on. He wanted to study the healing effect on them, as well as on himself.
He had himself infected with syphilis (with the assistance of a helpful sailor) and after daily observations of himself for a long while, he wrote his
Treatise on Venereal Disease.
His other studies allowed him to write the first book about inflamation:
Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds.
Here are some other things that Hunter accomplished:
He discovered that he could treat aneurysms by tying them off.
He performed the first recorded case of artificial insemination.. on his wife.
He transplanted rooster testicles into the abdominal cavities of other animals.
He transplanted a human tooth into a rooster's comb.
He invented the terms: bicuspid and incisor.
He obtained the corpse of Charles Byrne by bribery. Charles was an interesting 8 feet 2 inches tall.
In 1788, Hunter was acknowledged as the greatest surgeon in London, a city with a lot of surgeons.
Doctor Hunter was certainly a remarkable person. I plan to read the book about him by J. Dobson.. its unremarkable title is:
John Hunter.
07.
Rene Laennec, born in 1781 in Brittany. Embarrassed by placing his ear against the chest of buxom young women and hairy old men, he rolled a notebook up into a paper tube and thus invented the stethescope. Using this instrument and using percussion (tapping the chest), a new way to diagnose disease was developed.
08.
William Morton, born in 1819 in the United States, probably Boston. Morton was a dentist who competed with two other persons for a $100,000 prize to be awarded for the first usage of anaesthesia. In 1846, Morton publically demonstrated ether as an anesthesia. Others had used it before, but it was not publicised. Lots of controversy here. I don't think that the prize was ever awarded. (I can still remember going under ether when I had my appendectomy. I will never forget the smell. I was scared to death that I would not wake up.)
09.
Rudolf Virchow, born in 1821 in Pomerania. Virchow gets the credit for teaching that disease begins in a cell. He wrote
Cellular Pathology. He also recognized a dangerous blood clotting, that he named a thrombus. He tried to get every doctor or student to use a microscope.
Like Hunter, he was a precocious Mensa member and dabbled in everything from archaeology to politics. He got into physical trouble when he jumped off of a moving streetcar. A shame - he still had lots of interests to feed.
10.
Joseph Lister, born in 1827 London. Lister discovered
antisepsis. He insisted on everything in the operating rooms being sprayed with carbolic acid, effectively killing germs. Late in his life, he observed something new being developed:
asepsis. Now surgeons had to scrub their hands, have their surgical instruments boiled, and wear sterile gowns and caps. (In 1889, William Halstead .. next in this outline, invented rubber gloves so his girlfriend would not get red hands from disinfectant.)
11.
William Halstead, born in 1852 in New York. Doctor Halstead is an extremely interesting man, whose career is bound up with
Johns Hopkins University and Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Johns Hopkins story is a great one that I won't get into here. You should just know that the Johns Hopkins University was the first medical college in the United States to require students to have graduated from college, to have studied biology, to have a reading knowledge of French and German, and to have high academic averages.
Women were to be admitted on the same basis as men.
Halstead was hired as the first professor of surgery, and he was a good one. He operated slowly and carefully, thereby doing a much better job than surgeons before him, who hurried through their work. Halstead's work was called the
surgery of safety.
Halstead is known for many things, including:
Radical hernia repair.
Radical mastectomy.
Safe thyroid surgery.
Invention of rubber gloves.. mentioned above.
Creation of the modern residency program - the Halsteadian technique.
I believe that he became good friends with
H.L. Mencken. They may have even played Bach together in their spare time.
Check out this amazing article about the four founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital, unquestionably the greatest hospital in the world.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history5.html
12.
Helen Taussig, born in 1898 in Boston. Taussig is a classic case of a woman fighting against the idea that a woman's place is always the home. She pushed herself to get the experience to find a correction for the hearts of
"blue babies." She advised Johns Hopkins surgeon
Alfred Blalog and his technical assistant,
Vivien Thomas on how to set up surgery based on her suggestions. (Vivien Thomas' life is worthy of a book itself.. he was an African American who could not afford to go to medical school, but became an indispensible assistant and respected advisor for Blalog's surgical career.)
Elaine worked as a Johns Hopkins technician for several years and knew about Doctor Blalog's surgical work. She also passed Helen Taussig every day in the hall at work.
I'm afraid that I have rambled on too much on this subject, but, as you can tell, I am very excited about the course that I listened too. Now I kind of wish that my Aunt Marjorie had prevailed and pushed me to become a medical doctor.
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