history of medicine

Soon after qualification, Fortescue Fox (1858–1940) began practice in a Scottish spa where he acquired a lifelong interest in chronic disorders, especially arthritis. He worked to improve the status of spa medicine, recasting it as medical hydrology. At the start of the First World War, his interests turned to the handling of war casualties and a seminal work on physical treatment and rehabilitation was published in 1916. He set up a physical treatment clinic for damaged soldiers and co-founded a residential community where such treatment could be coupled with paid work in rural crafts.

This paper examines the recent upsurge in novels concerned with the history of medicine. It selects a range of different novels and asks how they relate to the work of the professional medical historian. Do these novels stimulate interest in the history of medicine or do they distort historical events? It is concluded that although writers often take liberties with the historical record, on balance, their work helps us to engage with the past and is likely to inspire readers to find out more about the history of medicine.

Dr James Riley, an honours graduate of Edinburgh University, had to give up a surgical career because of an affliction of his hands, and instead became a radiotherapist in Dundee. He had always been fascinated by past heroes of medical research, and set out to carve his own niche in the study of mast cells. In the early 1950s, no one knew what their function was other than the mast cell granules being the storehouses of heparin.

Despite being of peasant stock from a small village on the southern coast of China, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the founder and first provisional president of the Republic of China, was exposed to Western education early in life. Educated first in Hawaii and then in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, he was influenced by Christianity, democracy and liberalism. It was the years of his tertiary education at the Hong Kong College of Medicine that moulded his ultimate destiny as the healer of a nation.