Journal of Medical Biography最新文献

The physician, activist, essayist, radical free thinker, polyglot and first African American medical graduate James McCune Smith has for long been a forgotten figure. Despite extensive writings, a lack of oratory skills, when compared with those of his contemporaries, had relegated him to a lesser place in the pantheon of the abolitionist movement and overdue recognition. His education at Glasgow University provided a knowledge he applied not only to his medical practice and publications but also in his wider writings. In championing equality, emancipation and the abolition of slavery McCune Smith did not hold back in calling out pomposity, inaccuracy and the misrepresentation of facts by others, irrespective of their position or prominence. His forensic approach and knowledge of the medical literature of the times were evident from his student days to the last essays. This article addresses the formative years, exile in Glasgow to achieve the education denied in his homeland and his return to New York as a newly qualified physician.

Lorenzo Martini (1785-1844) was a physician devoted to promoting hygiene and preventive health. He combined clinical practice with public engagement and relied on both documentary records and debates to shape his practical advice. After a brief biographical profile, we turn to a close reading of the hygiene section of his Manuals of Hygiene and Medical Police (1835) and we examine how that part seeks to disseminate concrete hygienic practices among the population. The study rests on the original 19th-century edition of the Manual as a primary source, with other primary documents in the Historical Archives of the University of Turin and the State Archives of Genoa, and it is supported by secondary sources that help reconstruct Martini's life and situate his ideas within the medical culture of his time. Martini presents prevention as the primary route to protect health, and he argues that the best way to avoid or at least reduce the risk of chronic diseases is to maintain a general state of balance across all aspects of life, including daily habits, environment, diet. Traces of miasmatic and humoral theories of Hippocratic and Galenic origin remain in Martini's thought, showing how emergent preventive ideas coexisted with older medical doctrines.

Having gained his medical education at Glasgow University, McCune Smith returned to New York City to establish himself. Difficulties in his acceptance were evidenced by the New York Academy of Medicine's refusal of membership and the New York Medical and Surgical Society preventing him from presenting in person at a meeting. He can claim the first peer-reviewed publication and presentation by an African American physician and interacted with both the elite of New York's medical establishment and his unqualified fellow African American colleagues. Whilst writing and lecturing on a range of medical topics, his most memorable achievements lie in the essays on climate, longevity, racial equality and civilisation. In each, he showed a mastery of quantitative analysis, physiology, comparative anatomy and the medical textbooks of the time. It is not just as a physician and pharmacist that he should be remembered but also as the foremost black social scientist of his era with an enquiring analytical approach learnt from and revealed in his Glasgow years. This article will examine his medical practice and writings as well as those essays that displayed his scientific knowledge.

Edward S. Miller was born into slavery in 1858. After navigating the racist educational system in Kentucky, he moved north to seek greater opportunities. In Chicago, he obtained medical training, built a practice in the Black community, and participated in the growth of Provident Hospital. He earned broad respect and expanded his networks, serving in the Spanish American War as a field surgeon for a unique Black volunteer regiment. He prospered as an entrepreneur and civic leader, using the power of community networks to help found the first Black cemetery and a federally chartered bank in Chicago, both of which supported the Black community. Miller was a respected civic leader and physician whose story illustrates the complexity and challenges of the medical system in the north at the turn of the 20th century and the resourcefulness needed by a Black leader to succeed in a segregated society.

Dr Florence Sabin is remembered for her research on cellular histology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Rockefeller Institute. This paper highlights her first project while she was just an Intern at the Johns Hopkins Hospital (1900-1901), when she undertook to make a wax model of an infant's brainstem, using a 'stacked wax plate' method. She then collaborated with artist Friedrich Ziegler to construct a set of larger wax brainstem models, designed to reveal the internal neuroanatomy. The use of wax embryo models for research and teaching embryology was popular during the late nineteenth century but quickly became obsolete during the twentieth century, overtaken by improved research techniques and audio-visual teaching aids. Examples of Ziegler's models can still be found in some medical museums; however the Sabin/Ziegler brainstem model is very rare.

Tikhon Efimovich Boldyrev was a prominent Soviet epidemiologist. During the Sino-Soviet collaboration of the 1950s, he played a key advisory role in shaping health policies in the newly established People's Republic of China. This article explores Boldyrev's life and his journey to China, where he served as Group Leader of the Soviet Experts and Chief Expert at the Chinese Ministry of Health from 1954 to 1956. During his tenure, Boldyrev authored twenty reports and proposals that influenced China's public health policy. His notable contributions included introducing and adapting the Soviet healthcare model to Chinese conditions; endorsing traditional Chinese medicine and advocating for its integration with modern medical science; and providing critical expertise in epidemic prevention, particularly in combating diseases such as schistosomiasis and plague. Drawing on Boldyrev's work completed in China, along with Chinese-language government reports, press coverage, and professional journals, this article brings renewed attention to his important yet often overlooked contributions to public health in 1950s China.

Charles Sumner was an outspoken abolitionist and Republican United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1851 to 1874. In 1856, at the height of the national debate about slavery before the Civil War, Sumner was assaulted in the Senate chamber by a Democratic congressman from South Carolina. Preston Brooks attacked Sumner by striking him on the head and neck over 30 times using his walking cane as a weapon. After the attack, Sumner lost consciousness and was carried out of the Senate chamber. Though he recovered over the week following the attack, Sumner did not return full-time to his Senate seat until December 1859 due to the sequelae of his injuries. Historians have debated the cause of Sumner's prolonged disability, with several suggesting that he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Although diagnosis cannot be made definitively, the details of Brooks' assault and Sumner's subsequent medical history suggest that Sumner's documented symptoms during his three-year recovery were likely the result of a traumatic brain injury.

A slim 75-page 'book,' The Production of Antibodies: A Review and a Theoretical Discussion was published 84 years ago, in 1941. The authorship is normally attributed to Francis MacFarlane Burnet (1889-1985), 1960 Noble Laureate for his research on acquired immune tolerance and acknowledged as the most famous Australian scientist. A revised edition in 1949 was co-authored with Frank Fenner (1914-2010), another distinguished Australian virologist, best remembered for the elimination of smallpox in Australia and for control of the rabbit population. The curiosity and the topic of this paper is that three collaborators are listed on the title page of the 1941 book - Mavis Freeman, A. V. (Alan Vaughan) Jackson and Dora Lush. All three worked with Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne between 1936 and 1939/1940 during which time they were co-authors on 25 research papers. Who were these collaborators, what did they contribute to the book and why the confusion over authorship? This journey takes us into research on influenza, poliomyelitis, smallpox, myxomatosis, herpes, Q fever and scrub typhus undertaken by brilliant scientists who contributed to important advances in virology and immunology with one tragic consequence.

Alexander Blackrie (bap. 1702, d. 1772) was a Scottish Surgeon-Apothecary who attended Aberdeen's grammar school and Marischal College. He served as surgeon-general in India and practised at Bromley, Kent, England. In later life, he suffered from the 'gravel and stone' i.e., urological stones. This triggered an enquiry into the lucrative medication of Dr Chittick of Bath. Blackrie deduced it to be nothing more than soap-lye (Sodium hydroxide) and went on to formulate his own version ('Blackrie's lixivium'). Blackrie undertook comparative experiments on the efficacy of these two products at dissolving equally-sized fragments of the same urinary stone. In 1763, he published his proposal to compare the two products in patients. This called for: selection of patients 'afflicted in the same degree', randomisation by 'dividing them equally by lot', the 'experiment' to be 'repeated' and the number of participations to be 'large'. Although never implemented, Blackrie's proposal is an early model of a randomised controlled trial and may be the first description of a non-inferiority trial. His use of the term 'decisive' experiment and reference to James Jurin FRS may offer a link with Hauksbee the Younger's 1743 proposed 'experimentum crucis'. Blackrie's contribution to the development of fair comparisons of treatments deserves greater recognition.