PATHFINDERS IN MEDICINE
By Victor Robinson. Medical Review of Reviews. 317 pp. Price $2.50; by mail of The Survey $2.67.
This book contains a series of papers most of which have already appeared in the Medical Review of Reviews, the Medical Record, and other magazines. It is dedicated to Ernst Haeckel. Dr. Abraham Jacobi wrote the preface.
The Pathfinders include famous men whose names are familiar to every one, such as Galen, Paracelsus, Servetus, Paré, Hunter, Jenner and Darwin, and also some who are only vaguely known to most of us. Among these are Aretaeus, Scheele, Laennec, Semmelweiss. We are not told what prompted the selection of these particular Pathfinders, or why such names as Boerhaave, Sydenham, Pasteur and Virchow were omitted, but one cannot demand that such a book be all-inclusive.
Mr. Robinson has lived with the characters of whom he writes until he has formed a vivid picture of the personality of each, a picture he manages to convey to his audience with great success. Naturally it is the earlier Pathfinders who are most interesting to the ordinary reader and the chapter on Galen holds many surprises for those who have been accustomed to think of the medical skill of the ancients very much as we think of Chinese medicine of today. Galen knew that consumption was communicable, and his disquisitions on dietetics and hygiene are almost incredibly modern.
The chapter on Paracelsus is especially vivid and delightful, while the description of Aretaeus, “the forgotten physician” gives us a picture of a man full of insight and sympathy. Of the later chapters the most interesting are the one on the many-sided Hunter and that which tells of the heroic and tragic struggle of Semmelweiss against the blind conservatism of his own profession.
In the course of one chapter Mr. Robinson remarks that “all writing is autobiographical” and that “prejudices ... will become apparent, ... where you least expect.” This is true of his own book. No one can read a chapter without discovering the author’s antipathy to the Christian religion, and the monarchical system of government. This prejudice against what he regards as superstition and sycophancy, leads him into some extreme statements and mars to a certain extent what would otherwise be delightful reading. If Calvin had been nothing more than the man Mr. Robinson describes, he could hardly have held sway over the minds of several generations as he did. Mr. Robinson will also find that the Bretons opposed the French Revolution not from blind devotion to monarchical tyrants, but because it meant the breakdown of a system of local self-government and common lands to which their Celtic natures clung.
Alice Hamilton, M.D.