Medicine: A Love Story563 pages. Denver, CO: Outskirts Press; 2012. $22.95; $10.00 (Kindle). ISBN: 978-1-4327-9415-6

Abstract

563 pages. Denver, CO: Outskirts Press; 2012. $22.95; $10.00 (Kindle). ISBN: 978-1-4327-9415-6 In this engaging autobiography, Dr Stollerman provides a unique and highly informative overview of the development of academic medicine during the 20th century. (Full disclosure: I came to know and admire Dr Stollerman when we sat together at Dartmouth Medical Grand Rounds during the past 20 years.) The book begins when the author was cupped for lobar pneumonia at around 4 years of age: “Rinse the little cups in alcohol, then flame it off. Apply the warm cups to the chest quickly so that when they cool they create a vacuum and stick. Pull them off with a resounding ‘pop’ – not too painful and quite intriguing as you watch the welts rise under them.” The interest in medicine kindled by this experience was reinforced when, at age 15, his mother gave him a copy of Paul DeKruif’s Microbe Hunters , and his father an old microscope that “thrust me into the world of microbiology.” He attended Dartmouth College, where the “scene was poster New England”; here, the curriculum stimulated a “four-year growth spurt in learning the origins of human values [that provided] a firm basis for the science, ethos and ethics of medicine.” As a freshman medical student at Columbia in 1941, he found gross anatomy “mesmerizing” and “reveled” in physiology. The following year, he was found to have a “remarkably high titer” of antitype I pneumococcus antibody and so was asked to donate blood samples that made him a “direct contributor to the … development of the pneumococcal vaccine” and “seeded the germ of vaccine research as my subsequent lifetime interest.” Descriptions of medical school and residency abound with fascinating anecdotes such as the cardiologist who “seeing the long stethoscope tubes we brought from …