Since the 1950s, the death rate from heart attacks has plunged from 35 percent to about 5 percent—and fatalistic attitudes toward this disease and many others have faded into history. Much of the improved survival and change in attitudes can be traced to the work of Eugene Braunwald, MD. In the 1960s, he proved that myocardial infarction was not a “bolt from the blue” but a dynamic process that plays out over hours and thus could be altered by treatment. By redirecting cardiology from passive, risk-averse observation to active intervention, he helped transform not just his own field but the culture of American medicine.

Braunwald’s personal story demonstrates how the forces of history affected the generation of researchers responsible for so many medical advances in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1938 Nazi occupiers forced his family to flee Vienna for Brooklyn. Because of Jewish quotas in medical schools, he was the last person admitted to his class, but went on to graduate number one. When the Doctor Draft threatened to interrupt his medical training during the Korean War, he joined the National Institutes of Health instead of the Navy, and there he began the research that made him the most influential cardiologist of his time.

In Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, Thomas H. Lee offers insights that only authoritative firsthand interviews can provide, to bring us closer to this iconic figure in modern medicine.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have become accustomed to medical breakthroughs and conditioned to assume that, regardless of illnesses, doctors almost certainly will be able to help—not just by diagnosing us and alleviating our pain, but by actually treating or even curing diseases, and significantly improving our lives. 

For most of human history, however, that was far from the case, as veteran medical historian Michael Bliss explains in The Making of Modern Medicine. Focusing on a few key moments in the transformation of medical care, Bliss reveals the way that new discoveries and new approaches led doctors and patients alike to discard fatalism and their traditional religious acceptance of suffering in favor of a new faith in health care and in the capacity of doctors to treat disease. He takes readers in his account to three turning points—a devastating smallpox outbreak in Montreal in 1885, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School, and the discovery of insulin—and recounts the lives of three crucial figures—researcher Frederick Banting, surgeon Harvey Cushing, and physician William Osler—turning medical history into a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.

Compact and compelling, this searching history vividly depicts and explains the emergence of modern medicine—and, in a provocative epilogue, outlines the paradoxes and confusions underlying our contemporary understanding of disease, death, and life itself. 

Dean of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health in the 1920's and '30's,David Edsall was one of the leaders in a period of great change and progress in medicine. At the beginning of Edsall's career, a doctor's chief weapons were his informed mind and trained senses. By the end of it, the permanent alliance of the sciences and medicine had profoundly altered the doctor's practice and his education. It was a time of struggle, of conflict, and of enduring accomplishment.

Edsall was at the center of this revolutionary effort in three leading schools of medicine: the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvard. He began his career in Pennsylvania as recording clerk to the famous Dr. William Pepper, Jr., at the same time making scientific contributions in metabolism through his work in the Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine. By 1907 he had become Professor of Therapeutics and Pharmacology. In 1910 and '11, for one stormy year, he was the school's Professor of Medicine. This was a key year -in 1910 the publication of Abraham Flexner's Medical Education in the United States and Canada had led to the eradication of one quarter of U. S. medical schools and radical reform of many others.

From Pennsylvania Edsall went to St. Louis as Professor of Preventive Medicine, and his part in the reform of that medical school is both controversial and fascinating.

,Edsall's appointment in 1912 to a double post at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital brought him to Boston -the field of his major contributions. This remarkable period was the day of such people as Harvard's Walter Cannon, Otto Folin, Harvey Cushing, Alice Hamilton, L. J. Henderson. It saw the founding of the School of Public Health, the major endowment of the Medical School. In his ten years at the hospital and his seventeen years as dean, as in his influence as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, Edsall gave direction to many developments in American medicine which bear his mark to this day.