The characters profiled in A Scientific Revolution: Ten Men and Women Who Reinvented American Medicine (Pegasus Books, 2022) by Ralph H. Hruban, Med '85, and Will Linder, A&S '72, sure would make for one fascinating fantasy dinner party. There's the no-BS woman who helped stir the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to life, the white men who cemented its reputation, and the Black technician who worked patiently—and in relative obscurity—for decades alongside one of its groundbreaking surgeons.
The authors kick off their profiles of ten of the school's iconoclasts with the indomitable Mary Elizabeth Garrett, a railroad heiress and feminist philanthropist who convinced Johns Hopkins leadership to admit women to its new School of Medicine as a condition of her donating the necessary funding for it to open in 1893.
Four of the next concise but richly detailed portraits bring to life the innovative and risk-taking physicians who flourished during the school's early days. We have William Henry Welch, its first dean, and William Osler, who brought students into patient wards and published the field's definitive medical textbook (The Principles and Practice of Medicine). Next come a pair of daring-doers, the surgeon William Stewart Halsted (who once jabbed a syringe into himself to perform an impromptu blood transfusion) and Jesse William Lazear (whose explorations of infectious diseases included an ultimately deadly exposure to yellow fever-infected mosquitoes) complete this quartet of willful Williams.
Two other non-medical personalities flesh out the development of the school. The multi-talented Civil War veteran John Shaw Billings combined his affinity for what today might be referred to as information management and environmental design to bring light, air, and organization into Hopkins' medical facilities. The German-born Max Brödel revolutionized the art of anatomical illustration. In a nod to that legacy, David Rini, a professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine, for which Brödel served as the first director, drew the expressive character portraits that open each chapter.
Wary of hagiography, the authors take pains to address the less savory aspects of, say, Brödel (racist attitudes) and Halsted (drug addiction). They also acknowledge the institution's susceptibility to contemporary prejudices.
Also see
'A Scientific Revolution' Review: Making Medicine Modern
Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, who identified the cellular components of Hodgkin's lymphoma, surmounted a life beset by tragedy. As a six-year-old, she experienced the sudden death of her father; as a young married woman she endured the deaths of her first two children. Her battle against sexism started early, too: on her first day of medical school, Osler sidled up to her and hissed "go home." Helen Taussig and Vivien Thomas, a white female doctor and a black male surgical technician, also fell prey to the era's sexism and racism and were routinely overshadowed by the pioneering heart surgeon who performed the life-saving blue baby surgery they had conceived of and perfected. Still, they persisted. And that, suggest the authors, is the heart of science and the heart of Hopkins.
