Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography. By Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., FACS, The Teaching Company, Chantilly Virginia, 2005

The Teaching Company (www.teach12.com) has produced this course (#8128) in a series of twelve lectures given by Sherwin B. Nuland, Professor of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine on the history of medicine. Each lecture is thirty minutes in length and available in two formats, CD or DVD. The course can be purchased either online or by telephone order through the Teaching Company. The DVD format provides a video taping of the lecturer with illustrations of the materials discussed in the lecture. The course includes a booklet providing an outline of the lecture, timeline for the course, glossary and annotated list of references. It is possible to purchase separately a verbatim transcript of the entire set of lectures. Sherwin B. Nuland’s publications include the 1994 New York Times best-seller “How We Die”, and a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. He has been a contributor articles to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and The American Scholar.

Each lecture focuses on an individual historical figure placing his contribution to medicine in a historical context and presenting an overview of his life and career. As a lecturer, Professor Nuland has a clear and engaging style. He is well organized and very informative. As an example, he begins his lecture “Morgagni and the Anatomy of Disease” by paraphrasing Morgagni’s medical history of a man 72 years of age who develops progressive abdominal pain and after an illness of twelve days suffers a febrile convulsion and dies. The body is brought to the hospital for dissection by the then 23 year old Giovanni Morgagni and reveals diffuse peritonitis resulting from a ruptured abscess that is itself the result of a ruptured appendix. He then proceeds to describe the evolution, publication history and impact of Morgagni’s historical three volume work “On the Seats and Causes of Diseases Indicated by Anatomy” and the essential role it played in forming our modern anatomic basis for the understanding of disease. The historical figures and topics selected for these lectures include: Hippocrates, Galen, Versalius (de Humani Corpis Fabrica/On the Workings of the Human Body), William Harvey (De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus/Anatomical Studies on the Motion of the Heart and the Blood in Animals), Giovanni Morgagni, John Hunter (surgeon as scientist), Rene Laennec (the invention of the stethoscope), William Morton (anesthesia), Rudolph Virchow (the cellular origin of disease), Joseph Lister (the germ theory of disease), William Halstead (American medical education) and Helen Taussig (the development of cardiac surgery).

This lecture series should be of interest to all physicians and provides an interesting and attractive overview of the history of medicine (a subject for which there is little or no room in the demanding curriculum of most medical schools). Irrespective of ones level of knowledge in the area of medical history, there are points of interest in every lecture. The series might also serve as an attractive gift for someone entering or graduating medical school.

James L. Franklin, M.D.
Rush University
President, Society for the History of
Medicine and the Humanities of Chicago
Jameslfrank@sbcglobal.net