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Oxford Medicine Edited by Kenneth Dewhurst (review)

Kenneth Dewhurst, distinguished physician and medical historian, has written notable biographies of Thomas Dover, John Locke, Thomas Willis, and Thomas Sydenham. He has contributed many papers of his studies on Oxford greats. The occasion of the printing of the collection of essays on Oxford medicine, which Kenneth Dewhurst edited, was the two hundredth birthday of the Radcliffe Infirmary, one of the many monuments to John Radcliffe's shrewdness, popularity, and generosity. Hugh Sinclair begins with a discourse of the seesaw ups and downs of medicine and science at Oxford. Dewhurst himself contributes an essay expanded from one he had previously published on "An Oxford Medical Quartet: Sydenham, Willis, Locke and Lower," but perhaps even more apposite to his fine sketch of John Radcliffe. Despite the fact that he has had several biographers, by far the most sympathetic sketch of Radcliffe is in MacMichael's The Gold Headed Cane. Included is an interesting symposium on the relationship of Oxford University and the Radcliffe Infirmary. Medicine, as a training for poetry, is discussed in John Potter's essay on Robert Bridges. It is surprising that no mention is made of the famous Daniel Press of Oxford, where some dozens of Robert Bridges's early poems were published in separate booklets, and whose present director, Dr. Bent Jewel Jensen, is on the staff of Radcliffe Infirmary. A number of essays deal quite naturally with Osier, who certainly added luster and distinction to medicine at Oxford during his tenure of the Regius Professorship from 1905 until his death in 1919. The reprinting of Sir Geoffrey Jefferson's "Memories of Hugh Cairns" gives a vivid account of one of the important people in Oxford's more recent medical history. This is brought right up to date in L. J. Witts's essay on "Twenty-seven Years a Nuffield Professor," which is autobiographical, and his scholarly essay, entitled "On Running a Department of Medicine," as well as his perceptive discourse on "Success in Medicine." Although this collection represents largely an ingathering of earlier papers and essays, it makes an admirable volume to celebrate the bicentenary of the establishment of the Radcliffe Infirmary, probably the most productive and useful, if not the most satisfying from the architectural point of view, of the many Radcliffe buildings in Oxford. It should not be forgotten that fundamental contributions to medicine were made at Oxford by physicians and scientists; for example, Sir Archibald Garrod who introduced the fundamental concept of inborn errors of metabolism. The Radcliffe Infirmary saw the first clinical use of penicillin in human disease and, indeed, much fundamental work on its development and production. Sherrington illuminated an epoch at Oxford, and Charles Singer advanced his reputation for scholarly work in the history of science at Oxford. Despite the fact that he made no single great or unique contribution to medical science or clinical medicine, the sum total of Osier's influence and its happy