Doctor's Project

The world's greatest living medical historian let it be known last week that he is quitting his job to do some "freelance writing." Dr. Henry Ernest Sigerist, for the past 15 years director of Johns Hopkins' famed Institute of the History of Medicine, has a project: a monumental, eight-volume history of medicine, the first to be written in nearly a century and a half.* When the history is finished, he will start on a work equally close to his heart: a four-volume "sociology of medicine."

Dr. Sigerist's announcement came as a surprise to fellow medicos. At 56, he will give up (in June) one of the world's pleasantest, most influential medical jobs, and retire to a quiet Swiss village. Sigerist thinks it is none too soon: his writing program, for which he has been preparing for the last 25 years, will take at least twelve years.

Born in Paris of Swiss parents, Henry Sigerist was brought to the U.S. and a Johns Hopkins professorship in 1931 by the late grand old man of medicine, William Henry Welch, first dean of Johns Hopkins' Medical School. To most U.S. physicians, Sigerist is best known as the nation's ablest, and most respected, champion of socialized medicine (TIME, Jan. 30, 1939). But social medicine is only one of his interests. Since coming to Hopkins, he has carried a heavy teaching schedule, directed Hopkins' Welch Memorial Library, reorganized health services in Saskatchewan and India, translated old writings -- both medical and non-medical -- and written half a dozen books.

In Switzerland, without distraction from students or politics, Sigerist proposes to devote himself to quiet reflection and writing. He thinks that his history of medicine will be the last to be written by one man: medicine is becoming so complicated that "next time it will be done by a group." He is already preparing an attractive blurb for his book: "It will be a history of human civilization with emphasis on health and medicine. It will tell what people in the various civilizations ate and wore. It will tell what kind of houses the Egyptians lived in and whether they had flush toilets. That is important."

* The last big medical history, by Germany's Kurt Sprengel, was published in 1803.

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