Each chapter of this book is a short biography of an eminent person in the history of medicine—from Hippocrates to Watson and Crick and to the race to reveal the secrets of the human genome. Adler writes enthusiastically and engagingly about his subjects, relaying not only the important factual elements of their discoveries in a way that is easy to absorb but also details of their family backgrounds and the scientific and social contexts he considers likely to have contributed to why that particular person made their fundamental discovery at the time they did.
Figure 1.
Robert E Adler
Wiley, £15.95/€21.70/$24.95, pp 240 ISBN 0 471 40175 7
Rating: ★★★
This works better for some of the stories he describes than others. I was gripped by that of Louis Pasteur. This story conveyed Pasteur's enormous curiosity and determination in adversity (three of his children died from typhoid, and he had a severe stroke at the age of 46 but continued working productively until his 70s), but also the chain of events by which he went from being a research chemist to making fundamental discoveries in the field of medical science.
Peer rivalry and competition recur in the stories—perhaps most fascinatingly in the chapter about the discovery of anaesthesia. Here, none of the three protagonists—Crawford Long, William Morton, or Horace Wells—ever benefit from their contribution to the discovery.
Inevitably, many of the subjects are well known as important in the history of medicine, but the book also has some intriguing accounts of the relatively unknown. One example is the 13th century Islamic physician and surgeon Ibn al-Nafis, who seems to have realised that Galen's theories about the physiology and anatomy of the circulation were wrong and accurately described the cardiopulmonary circulatory system while working in Cairo several hundred years before Servetus, Vesalius, and Harvey, although his writings disappeared and were not then rediscovered until the 20th century.
Interestingly, the only woman who features in a chapter is Margaret Sanger, a fiery social activist for birth control in the United States, and she shares her chapter with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, the men who developed the contraceptive pill.
Who knows how many other potential discoveries have been lost because the context wasn't right?