Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist Gerald N. Grob Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, eds. Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xiii + 387 pp. Ill. $39.95. Between the 1920s and 1950s, Henry E. Sigerist was regarded as the most influential historian of medicine in the world. Born in 1891, he had a cosmopolitan upbringing. He lived in Paris until the age of ten, when, shortly before his father’s death, he moved to Zurich. He was educated at the University of Zurich and eventually received his M.D. from that institution in 1917 following a brief interlude for clinical instruction in Munich. After military service in Switzerland, he went to Leipzig to study with Karl Sudhoff, perhaps the preeminent figure in medical history at that time. Abandoning clinical practice, young Sigerist devoted the rest of his life to medical history. His career was almost meteoric in character. In 1925 he succeeded Sudhoff as director of the University of Leipzig Institute of the History of Medicine. Seven years later, he moved to Baltimore to replace the venerable William Henry Welch as director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute of the History of Medicine, a position he held until 1947. He spent the final decade of his life in Switzerland working on a never-to-be-completed multivolume history of medicine. Sigerist’s accomplishments during his years at Hopkins were impressive by any standards. He laid the foundations for an academic program; he founded the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and worked assiduously to elevate its quality; he sought to transform the American Association for the History of Medicine into a more professional scholarly organization; and he played an influential role in transforming medical historiography and creating the subdiscipline of medical sociology. Nor was his career limited to the world of scholarship: his social, political, and economic ideology thrust him into the public arena, and his advocacy of compulsory health insurance made him a controversial figure within American medicine. In Making Medical History, Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown have brought together a group of essays that explore Sigerist’s multifaceted career. The result is a fascinating if uneven portrait of an individual whose name will always be synonymous with medical historiography. The book is divided into four sections. The first includes three biographical essays by Marcel H. Bickel, Ingrid Kastner, and Genevieve Miller covering the period down to 1947, followed by a discussion by Ilza Veith on Sigerist as an Orientalist, and a personal contribution by his daughter Nora Sigerist Beeson. The second section deals with Sigerist as a medical historian, with chapters by Owsei Temkin, Heinrich von Staden, Michael R. McVaugh, and Elizabeth Fee and Theodore Brown. The third section focuses on Sigerist’s public career as advocate, and includes essays by Fee, John F. Hutchinson, Walter J. Lear, and Brown. The final part contains assessments of Sigerist’s legacy as a medical sociologist by Milton I. Roemer, Leslie A. Falk, and Brown, and of his contributions as a historian by Brown and Fee. [End Page 357] Although they do not form a traditional historical narrative, the fifteen essays nevertheless offer a detailed portrait of a complex personality. Sigerist’s early interest in the internal aspects of medical history were soon transformed by his preoccupation with the cultural, social, and economic context within which medicine developed. In his eyes history had an important role in the medical curriculum; an understanding of the past could enlighten contemporary policy issues and medical organizational concerns. Hence he (and those who followed in his footsteps) insisted that the history of medicine remain within medical schools. In this sense, medical history did not follow the history of science, which became an autonomous subspecialty with few links to practicing scientists. To be sure, tensions within medical history are by no means absent. Nevertheless, the specialty has remained firmly anchored within medicine despite the fact that large numbers of its practitioners come from Ph.D. or combined M.D./Ph.D. programs. The essays also illuminate the competing forces that shaped Sigerist’s career. Recruited to...