Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine
Revealed Through Biography 2 DVD Set and
Book
Taught by Professor SHERWIN B.NULAND, M.D., Yale School of Medicine,
Yale School of Medicine
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Product Details
Publisher: The Teaching Company (2005)
ISBN-10: 1598030302
ISBN-13: 978-1598030303
Price $199.95
An ideal addition to highschool, college, and university History of Medicine reference and curriculum
supplementation materials
Doctors: The History Of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography is a twelve lecture DVD series
by Sherwin B. Nuland (Clinical Professor of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine and Fellow of the Yale
University Institution for Social and Policy Studies). Each of these twelve 30 minute lectures provides an
overview description of key personalities and their contributions to the history and development of
medicine from antiquity down to the twentieth century. The lectures include: Hippocrates and the
origins of Western Medicine; The Paradox of Galen; Vesalius and the Renaissance of Medicine; Harvey,
Discoverer of the Circulation; Morgagni and the Anatomy of Disease; Hunter, the Surgeon as Scientist;
Laennec and the Invention of the Stethoscope; Morton and the Origins of Anesthesia; Virchow and the
Cellular Origins of Disease, Lister and the Germ Theory; Halsted and American Medical Education; and
the series concludes with Taussig and the Development of Cardiac Surgery. Professor Nuland's deliver is
articulate, expert, engaging, informed and informative. Doctors is an ideal addition to highschool,
college, and university History of Medicine reference and curriculum supplementation materials, as well
as appropriate for homeschooling curriculums and community library DVD collections.
In today's era of modern Western medicine, organ transplants are routine, and daily headlines
about the mysteries of DNA and the human genome promise that the secrets of life itself are
tantalizingly within our reach.
Yet to reach this point took thousands of years.
One step at a time, through leaps of progress and hurdles of devastating disappointment,
humanity's medical knowledge has moved forward from a time when even the slightest cut held
the threat of infection and death, when the flow of blood within the body was a mystery, and
"cells" were not even a concept, and when the appearance of a simple instrument allowing a
physician to listen to the beat of a diseased heart was a profound advance.
How was medical science able to make this extraordinary journey? What major discoveries made
it possible? Who were the fascinating individuals responsible for those discoveries, and what
qualities prepared each of them for their unique roles in medical history?
The scope of medical history reveals a compelling story.
In Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography, Dr. Sherwin
Nuland draws on the lives of 12 of medicine's greatest contributors to tell the human story
behind the development of Western scientific medicine. (Asian medicine is not considered in this
course; nor are those systems categorized as alternative medicine.)
Striving, Disappointment, Genius ... and Greed
This course shows the human side of science. It's a story about strivings, disappointments,
triumphs of human genius, and sometimes, greed.
While medical science is described to some degree, this course focuses on personalities and tells
the story of medicine, and does not contain the wealth of scientific detail of a pure science
course. The focus here is on medical history.
We feel extraordinarily fortunate in being able to offer this course by this instructor. Physician,
surgeon, teacher, medical historian, and bestselling author, Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., F.A.C.S.,
is Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine. He brings to each lecture marvelous
skills in storytelling and in translating medical and other scientific issues into layman's language.
His lectures are presented with both humor and an easygoing, personable approach, reflecting the
qualities that have given his written work such lasting popularity. He will introduce you to
medicine's trailblazers: those he calls "among the most fascinating, and I might say, among the
most daring individuals that you might ever encounter in life, or in your reading, or even in the
movies."
Nature's Closet of Secrets
"Each of them—those who are likable, and those who are obnoxious, those who are modest, and
those who are egocentric—those who are serene and those who are crazed—each of them has a
unique story to tell us," Dr. Nuland says.
"But the thing that unites all of them is their extraordinary zeal for discovering the secrets of
nature, what one of the greatest of them, William Harvey, in the 17th century, would eventually
come to call 'nature's closet of secrets.' "
Dr. Nuland ranges far and wide across the intellectual and cultural landscape. He weaves into the
story topics such as the rise of universities and how they influenced medical education; the
appearance of scientific method and what we call "inductive reasoning" (from the smaller to the
greater); the influence of individual personality on achievement along with the accompanying
influence of national character and culture; the role of the church; and the part played by each
discoverer's psychological makeup.
History through Biography
More than anything else, however, you will get to know the people who pried those "closet of
secrets" from nature's grasp, and you'll share some of the intriguing stories that might not have a
place in a purely scientific course, but which imbue this course with enduring human fascination.
Consider:
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The favorite childhood play spot of a young 16th-century Flemish boy named Andreas
Vesalius. Descended from several generations of physicians, the young Vesalius spent
countless happy hours at a nearby place of execution, a gallows where the dead bodies of
criminals were left to rot. He was fascinated by the bits of bone and dried flesh he found.
Years later, he became a professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Padua and
published a book called De Humani Corporis Fabrica: On the Structure of the Human
Body. Published in 1543, and rich in illustrations by a protégé of Titian named Jan
Stephen van Calcar, the mammoth volume is the world's first truly accurate description of
human anatomy.
The horrible reality of surgery up until the middle of the 19th century, when screaming
patients had to be held down, and even the simple procedures then possible, such as
amputations, had mortality rates from infection that exceeded 50 percent. You will learn
the often-bizarre story behind the discovery of surgical anesthesia, which featured
suicides, imprisonment, and even psychotic behavior among the four principals vying for
historical recognition and a $100,000 prize promised by the U.S. Congress.
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Joseph Lister's monumental discovery of the cause of post-operative infection—and even
his demonstrable methods of preventing much of it—were rejected by his English
colleagues for a full generation, even as they were being accepted elsewhere.
The advent of pediatric cardiac surgery was launched by Helen Taussig, one of the first
great medical women from Johns Hopkins Medical School, who proposed the idea for the
"blue baby" operations performed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas. A brilliant
African American lab assistant there, Thomas guided the groundbreaking 1944 operation
over the shoulder of surgeon Blalock.
Dr. Nuland's course is a marvelous introduction to the science of medicine and is rich in human
detail, with every medical discovery explained and put into historical context by one of
medicine's most accomplished and famous writers. It is a must-have for anyone interested in the
fascinating story of medicine's evolution since the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece, and the
brilliant men and women who made this journey possible.
Please note: This course contains some discussion about certain historical medical practices and
experiments that, while common in their time, may seem barbaric and unusual to us today. The
professor does not necessarily describe them in graphic detail, but due to the subject matter of
this course, some descriptions of these practices do arise. This should be noted before selecting
this course for a young or sensitive individual.
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