Читать книгу Makers of Modern Medicine - James Joseph Walsh - Страница 1

The present volume is published at the solicitation of many friends who have read the articles contained in it as they appeared at various times in magazines and who deemed that they were worth preservation in a more permanent form. The only possible claim for its filling a want lies in the fact that it presents these workers in medicine not only as scientists but also and especially as men, in relation to their environment, social, religious and educational. I have to thank the editors of the Messenger, Donahoe's Magazine, The Catholic World and the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society, for permission to reprint the articles which appeared in their periodicals.

The opening chapter, The Making of Medicine, is an abstract from the introductory lecture of the course in the history of medicine at the Fordham University Medical School, New York. Much of the material for the article on the Irish School of Medicine was gathered for a lecture before the Historical Club of Johns Hopkins University and the District Medical Society of the District of Columbia. The sketch of the life of Dr. Jenner has not hitherto been published. All of the other articles have been considerably lengthened and revised.

There are other makers of modern medicine who deserve a place beside those mentioned here, but as the material had reached the amount that would make a good-sized volume it {viii} was thought better to proceed with the publication of the first series of sketches, which will be followed by others if conditions conspire to encourage any further additions to our not very copious English medical biography. A subsequent volume will contain sketches of the lives of old-time makers of medicine in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the men who laid the firm foundations of our medical science of the present day.

I have to thank my friend of many years and brother alumnus of Fordham University, Dr. Austin O'Malley, of Philadelphia, for reading the proofs and for suggestions while the book was going through the press.