Customer Reviews

Great Feuds in Medicine

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What a delightful page-turner this book turned out to be. I needed information, fast, and this sounded like a good buy. It sure was. The author makes very complex ideas and medical procedures understandable for lay people, but doesn't sacrifice the seriousness of his subject. His wry wit does not demean the eminent and not-so-eminent figures he writes about but, rather, brings them back to life. In fact, the author himself seems to be sitting in the room with you, relaxed and talking about some people you both know.

A sprightly romp through three hundred years of medical history, focusing on ten major contretemps. Entertaining and educational, it's also a cautionary tale for would-be medical researchers: many of the "heroes" of these tales (Semmelweis, Bernard, Franklin) meet extremely unkind fates. If you enjoyed Hellman's previous outing on feuds in science, you'll find here more of the same.

Men. I can say that, because all of these feuds involved men, except for one concerning Rosalind Franklin and the DNA fiasco...with one of my least favorite scientists, Watson.
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of ego that gets involved in scientific and medical discoveries. It's humongous! Fights concerning rights of discoveries or inventions, fights concerning doing the right thing for the patient (rather than the doctor), etc. have existed since the beginning of time and are continuing today. The very last section of the book had to do with the discovery of the AIDS virus by Gallo (American) and Montagnier (French).

Some of the earlier feuds had to do with the discovery of how the body really works through doing dissections of both animals and human cadavers. This was frowned upon by the Church, which basically ran society during the middle ages and into the Renaissance, but some brave men like Harvey and Di Vinci went ahead and did what needed to be done. So when they actually published their findings, all hell often broke lose. This often put these physicians and scientists at risk for life, but their refusal to rely on ancient theories from Galen is what paved the way for modern medicine.

I enjoyed the way Hellman writes. He's a little bit of of a cynic and smart aleck, just my type...since I'm that way myself. The information is concise and interesting. I knew about some of the fights from previous medical histories, but Hellman often gave information that wasn't available in these books. The story concerning Semmelweis who discovered the real reasons behind women dying in childbirth from pueperal fever (exhange of germs from cadavers to women in labor by doctors not cleaning up prior to touching those women) is probably one of the saddest stories I have ever read, especially since he ended up being brutalized in an insane asylum, and it killed him at an early age.

This should be on a list of required readings for medical and research students. Perhaps if more of them realized how ridiculous these spats are, especially if they involve ego and money (which is a current huge problem thanks to the pharmaceutical companies and kickbacks to physicians), they would learn to allow ethics to govern more of their behavior.

People who enjoy medical history, and teachers can use this book to interest students in medicine and research, because these are areas of a good percent of the jobs today.

Karen Sadler
Science Education

This book was a disappointment. I was expecting to read about various and important feuds, but instead there was a mere report of what happened concerning a limited list, not so much why. The only interesting story was the Salk vs. Sabin "feud", which was covered nicely, but others were a chore to read. It doesn't seem to me that the feud between Semmelweis and the Viennese Medical Establishment was so important as to be among the 10 feuds. The writing was not done in a way as to hold the reader's interest. Even the feud between Pasteur and the anti-bacterialists found me yawning, and this was one of the more interesting stories in the history of medicine.

What was good was that there are some creative feuds chosen by the author: for instance, I would never have thought that there was a feud about AIDS.

In summation, this book could serve as a weak supplement to an extremely comprehensive medical history library, but certainly not as a main text on the subject.