The Masters of Medicine: Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity’s Deadliest Diseases by Andrew Lam M.D.

Written by For the Novel Lovers on November 19, 2023. Posted in Current News

Book Review

Title: The Masters of Medicine: Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity’s Deadliest Diseases by Andrew Lam M.D.

Genre: Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

Rating: 5 Stars

In this book Dr. Andrew Lam looks at some of the most ground-breaking discoveries in modern medicine, which sounded intriguing to me. The introduction was well laid out with Lam’s goal being to walk us through these discoveries and introduces us to the people behind them, starting with the mavericks behind the advances in cardiac medicine.

Chapter 1 looks at heart disease because even today it is the biggest killer, more than all forms of cancer combined, even with our medical advances. The first person we look at is James Herrick who believed in 1913 that sudden deaths he was observed were caused by heart attacks but this wouldn’t be recognised until 1918. This was termed myocardial infarction and later in 1929, Werner Forssmann created the heart catheter which he experimented on himself. Dr. Mason Sones further this developed by finding that contrast dyes could be used for heart imaging. In 1963 Charles Dotter and Dr. Melvin Judkins used catheters of increasing size to remove blockages in arteries which was further developed into the balloon catheter by Andreas Grüntzig. In May 1977, Grüntzig and Myler performed the world’s first successful coronary balloon angioplasty on a patient undergoing coronary bypass. Many wouldn’t believe that the first heart operation was perform in 1896 by Ludwig Rehn but many still believed that damage to the heart was fatal since they didn’t have any way of stopping the heart.

Chapter 2 looks at diabetes which is the 8^th biggest killer in the USA today. Diabetes was the first time in history people were dying from eating too much instead of too little. Diabetes affected more than 422 million people worldwide which is around 10% of the population. The link between diabetes and pancreas was confirmed in 1889 by German physicians Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Merin but wasn’t investigated further until 1920. In 1920, Dr. Frederick Banting wanted to isolate the pancreas secretions to see if it helped diabetes and was helped by John Macleod and Charles Best. Banting and Best succeed in isolating insulin and treated dogs but they needed to perfect their method to harvest the secretions easily. They were joined by James Bertram Collip who helped them increase the purity of their compound creating what we know as insulin today. Insulin became available to the public in limited quantities but the results spoke for themselves as families witness their loved ones regain their health in a matter of days.

Chapter 3 focuses on bacterial infections, which has been debated a lot throughout history and seems to be an interesting chapter. In 1940, Albert Alexnader got a serious bacterial infection from shrapnel and was near death when he was offered and experimental medicine and although it was successful in part, he would later die from sepsis. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to identify bacterial microorganisms, he learnt that bacteria could be classified based on shape and colour when dyed. The Gram Stain was devised by Hans Christian Gram in 1884 and this led to two competing beliefs that claimed to explain the spread of disease. Contagionists believed that disease was passed via personal contact which were later labelled germs. They believed they had to separate sick people from healthy in quarantines, while anti-contagionists believed the environment was more blameworthy than human contact. They believed that miasmas or bad air caused illness and that the best way to combat an epidemic was to clean up squalid streets in order to properly cleanse the air.

Chapter 4 look at viral infections with the Polio epidemic which many had been exposed young due to poor sanitation and thus developed immunity. Polio was thought to be caused by bacteria but this was disproven in 1908 by Austrian physicians Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper. The Virus theory was supported by Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis and in the 1930s the advent of the electron microscope would make viruses visible for the first time. The 1916 epidemic caused 27,000 cases of paralysis and 6,000 deaths and in New York City alone, there were 8,900 cases and 2,400 deaths. 80% of victims were children younger than five, including many babies and in August 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt developed polio and he would never walk again. The National Foundation was founded by Roosevelt and funded multi-decade research effort to combat polio as they needed a vaccine. The progress for this vaccine was actually made due to an outbreak of smallpox, where Edward Jenner learnt that cowpox wasn’t fatal like smallpox and those who got cowpox would only develop a mild form of smallpox and recover or not catch it at all. He infected a boy with cowpox who recovered and then infected him with smallpox, but he didn’t get ill. Vaccination was quickly adopted and virology’s pioneers did not know they were working in a field that would be called immunology.

Chapter 5 focuses on cancer which is something that many of us will suffer with even today. Approximately 1.9 million Americans receive the bad news that they have cancer, 21% of deaths in the United States are due to cancer and it will eventually kill one out of every three of us. By 1938, cancer had risen to become the second most prolific killer in the US and we have to remember that cancer is a term that describes more than a hundred different diseases although all generally stem from the same fundamental problem, unwanted cell division. In 1971, the war on cancer began with William Halsted who developed operations for range of conditions, including hernias, aneurysms, and diseases of the thyroid and gallbladder. He reasoned that cancer likely spread directly outward from the tumour and in 1894, would pioneer what would become known as the radical mastectomy. The following year, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered that X-rays could be used to treat cancer but it was Émil Grubbé, who first used radiation to treat a local tumour in 1896. Pierre and Marie Curie recognized radium’s promise as a new way to treat cancer and Stewart Alexander found mustard gas lowered white blood cell count and again theorised it could be used to treat cancer.

Chapter 6 looks at medical trauma beginning with the shooting of James A. Garfield in an assassination attempt by Charles Guiteau. Many doctors examined Garfield but Dr. D. Willard Bliss took charge, however, he ignored sterile practices when examining the President. Effective management of traumatic injuries in modern time hinge on anesthesia and antisepsis. In 1842 Dr. Crawford Williamson Long became the first surgeon to employ anesthesia while Joseph Lister began to tackle infection. It is important to remember around this time over 80% of operations resulted in infections and half of those died but only 10% of patients undergoing amputations outside of hospitals died. In 1864, Lister read Louis Pasteur’s work about fermentation and realized that microbes could be the source of wound infections and that he might be able employ antimicrobial substances to combat these organisms.

Chapter 7 looks into trauma as two world wars produced a quantity and degree of trauma that had never been seen before. Casualties benefited from slow but undeniable improvements in triage, surgical technique, speed of care, and infection control but an examination of 48,000 British Army casualty records showed that 16% suffered face, head, and neck wounds. In 1914, at the outset of World War I, Harold Gillies was an otolaryngologist sent to oversee Charles Valadier, a dentist. Since Valadier was not licensed to perform surgery without a qualified surgeon quickly became clear that the army needed Valadier’s skills working on wounds of the lower face and there was an immense need for new methods of handling facial trauma, so Gillies traveled to Paris to observe Hippolyte Morestin. Gillies gained a reputation for performing reconstructive surgeries and opened a facial trauma unit in 1916.

The final chapter of the book looks into the advances made in childbirth. In 1817 Princess Charlotte of Wales was in labour and after labouring for fifty hours princess Charlotte delivered a stillborn, nine-pound boy. However, thirty minutes after the birth, the princess began to bleed, her doctors, Croft and Sims agreed that they had no choice attempt manual removal of placenta but at 2:30 a.m., she died. For millennia, childbirth was the major cause of maternal and foetal mortality with about 300,000 women dying from pregnancy and childbirth each year. In the developed world, maternal death in childbirth become rare in the last 70 years but this wasn’t always the case. This could have been for many reasons as when compared to other mammals, and primates, the human pelvis is narrow and a woman’s birth canal is constricted so that a baby’s head can only traverse it by rotating in transmit. The second half of this problematic equation is the baby’s enormous head as anatomical head size may be determining factor in length of human gestation.

Overall, I found Masters of Medicine to be an extremely informative read with lots of supporting evidence throughout for these historical advancements. Seeing where the starting point was for a lot of these issues such as medical trauma and childbirth was interested and seeing how far we have come was astonishing. For me personally, some of these figures were shocking especially those about childbirth given the fact that dying in labour is so rare in our modern age although it does still happen occasionally. If you are interested in the history of medicine or just learning about how we came to have things like antibiotics and plastic surgery then I’d highly recommend picking this book up.

Buy it here:

Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com

Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com

This review has been shortened – read the full version here

Source: Forthenovellovers

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