The Living History of Medicine

The history of medicine is a living one and involves much more than reflecting on the battles that have been won or lost in the ever-changing struggle against disease. The real history of medicine really lies within man himself and too often, the human side of this story is neglected. As doctors, we have been trained to focus on the signs of disease and consequently, we pay little attention to the people who discovered them. When we read in our pathology texts about the interesting triad of defects in an illness such as Hand-Schuller-Christian disease, we tend to forget about the doctors who faced great personal hardships to bring us the information we now use to treat the disorder. Few also tend to remember how great cultural cities, such as Vienna, changed after the fall of the Austrian Hungarian Empire from being a place of great intellectual wealth to one of secluded poverty. Less probably recall that when the father of modern western medicine, Sir William Osler, left this great city, he wrote a letter to his medical colleagues saying that the ‘Goddess of Medicine was now happily living in Germany, having moved there from Vienna’. In a less intuitive passage, he also remarked that she was unlikely to move again because of the honour and respect that she now had in Berlin.

?Would Osler have thought differently if he had known that his yet unborn son would grow up to fight against the might of Germany and then die an ignominious death in a waterlogged swamp in a foreign battlefield at Ypres? He certainly may have, if he could have foreseen Adolf Hitler’s troops searching the narrow streets of Vienna for his colleague, Anton Schuller; thereby forcing him to find a new home in Australia. He would probably even have concluded that the ‘Goddess of Medicine’ was now particularly unhappy in Berlin on learning the news that Schuller’s remaining family were all murdered in the concentration camps. But what he certainly totally underestimated was the ‘living entity’ of medicine, the fact that he would carry the medical knowledge of his lecturers in Vienna back to Maryland and in doing so, influence his students at the Johns Hopkins University. In his own way, he would cause the ‘Goddess of Medicine’ to gain wings and follow him on a long journey across the Atlantic. He would not have also foreseen that it would be his next-door neighbour and not himself who would be present at his son’s burial in France and that this man, Harvey Cushing, would eventually become one of the greatest surgeons of the twentieth century. Then again, were Osler’s interpretation of medical history too selective, constructed to support his determined panhellenism. He remains immortalised by successive generations of Oslerphiles, who empathetically describe him as the greatest physician in history. ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Either way, this is really the story of Osler’s ‘Goddess of Medicine’ and how she continually is on the move, fleeing from battles, tyranny and oppression, trying to find a home where man can have study pathology and practice medicine in peace. She has moved frequently over the last quarter of a millennium, from Edinburgh to Dublin, from London to Vienna, from Berlin to Maryland, forever restless and now again on the move eastward to the biotech world of California, and this book readily demonstrates those physicians on whom she has left her mark. From the west coast of America, she will probably rest for a while before a further journey back east to Europe and guide the work of our colleagues in the wonders of the new technologies, translating the genetic blueprint, manipulating the defects in the data code of our existence and hopefully help us all fight the more complex pandemic diseases of the new millennium. ????

Covid-19 vaccine and the work of Dr Ugur ?ahin and Dr Oezlem Tuereci.

I shall examine the work of Dr Ugur ?ahin and Dr Oezlem Tuereci, both Turkish-German immunologists and physicians who developed the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, and appreciate the foresight of Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, and her Oxford colleague Dr Catherine Green, who delivered the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 in record time. As she moves again, it will be interesting to see whether China will take the technological lead in providing the new technologies. Some would say that we are living in interesting times,?witnessing nations draw swords against each other in a region once known as the cradle of civilisation. This land of Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian Empires, where civilizations flourished long before that of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. This Garden of Eden, where the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were once considered amongst the Seven Wonders of the World, is where the origins of western medicine flourished. Between the ancient civilizations of Egyptians, Greek, Roman, and the Renaissance era in Europe, there was a gap, commonly called “the dark ages”, during which the flames of the knowledge of medicine was hosted, not by the West, but by the Arabs or Moslems. Certainly,?the most enlightened period of Islamic civilization took hold by the ascension of the Abbasid Caliphate and the transfer of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad by the middle of the 8th century. It was then when the Muslim world became an intellectual centre for science, philosophy, medicine, and education. Hence, I would like to dedicate part of the book to influence of the Baghdad School of Medicine on the medicine we practice today. These underlying values have often been neglected and unjustifiably overpassed by scholars in the West and this book allows us to acknowledge that fact and try and restore this missing part of our history. I worked as a doctor in the Ibn al Bitar Hospital in Baghdad, thirty years ago and respect its people and culture.

Lastly, I would like to note that although women have historically had lower participation levels in medical fields compared to men, we can see their growing influence in the later chapter of this book. This variance has occurred by race, socioeconomic status, and geography. Of course, we've come a long way since Rosalind Franklin's contributions to understanding the structure of DNA were overlooked in the 1950s. Today, Nobel Prizes for scientific achievements in medicine have been awarded to dozens of women, like Francoise Barré, Barbara McClintock, and Gertrude B. Elion and it is interesting to note that most of the people credited with helping to create the new Covid-19 vaccines have been female.

Dr Patrick J. Treacy Ballsbridge, Dublin 2021

Extract above is taken from Dr Patrick Treacy's book 'The Living History of Medicine' soon to be published in 2022

Dr. Treacy was awarded the ‘Top Aesthetic Practitioner in the World and 'Aesthetic Doctor of the Year’ UK (Las Vegas 2019. He is recognised as one of the most influential aesthetic practitioners in the world being named amongst the ‘Ultimate 100 Global Aesthetic Leaders’ (2019, 2018, 2017). His research has strongly influenced this specialist area. He has developed global protocols relating to dermal filler complications and wound healing, as well as pioneering techniques for HIV facial lipodystrophy facial end prostheses and radiosurgery venous thermocoagulation.?

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