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How a Textbook, a Former Baptist Minister, and an Oil Tycoon Shaped the Modern American Medical and Public Health Industrial-Research Complex

The Principles and Practice of Medicine
By William Osler
1079 pp
New York, NY, D Appleton, 1892

Howard Markel, MD, PhD

JAMA. 2008;299(10):1199-1201.

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

What constitutes a medical classic? Can the impact of a text be measured solely in terms of sales figures or citation numbers? What about its allegiance to what is believed to be scientific truth? Although Hippocrates and Galen wrote shelves of books that dominated medical thought for centuries, few of their ideas are considered pertinent to medical science today. Yet who would deny either of them their due as authors of medical classics? More critically, one might inquire, what was each particular work's historical trajectory and how did it inspire readers to act on the knowledge it imparted in the generations that followed?

With regard to this last query, perhaps the clearest example of a text's meteoric ascent to the pantheon of classics began in July 1897. A frequent sight for those swimming that summer in the crystal-blue Lake Liberty nestled in New York's Catskill Mountains . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Howard Markel, MD, PhD