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Howard Markel, MD, PhD

JAMA. 2006;295:2886-2887.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Minutes before noon on October 7, 1896, the medical students hurriedly took their seats in a spanking-new, cherrywood-paneled amphitheater charged with the energy of youthful excitement and professional ambition.¹ The topic to be discussed was fever, a vital sign that had vexed and fascinated physicians since the dawn of recorded medical history.

These physicians-to-be represented America’s, indeed the world’s, best and brightest hopes for a healthy future. Their medical school, Johns Hopkins (named for the dyspeptic, cranky, but decidedly wealthy Quaker merchant who endowed it), had only opened its doors 3 years earlier in provincial Baltimore, Maryland. But it had immediately assumed the vanguard of fin de siècle Western medicine as the profession leaped from blind allegiance to centuries-old, not infrequently toxic, medications and heroic surgical measures to the laboratory-based enterprise that characterizes modern medical practice.²

The room instantly hushed as the professor entered the room. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Center for the History of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor.

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JAMA 2007;297:2139-2140.
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