Editor's Note
The Thrill of the Hunt
I went to college in the late 1960s, a time when protest marches, radical politics, and the drug revolution were swirling around me. Central to all the chaos was the Vietnam War, a perplexing, exhausting conflict that challenged my conservative, anti-Communist upbringing.
In choosing my college major—history—I hoped to gain a solid understanding of that war as well as the cultural upheaval that had overtaken the United States. So I wrote my senior thesis on the 1954 Geneva Agreement that “solved” the French Vietnam war and laid the seeds for U.S. involvement. That 108-page volume of turgid prose born of hundreds of hours in the subterranean stacks of Princeton’s Firestone Library now sits gathering dust on my bookshelf, and I frequently ask whether that exercise in amateur scholarship or, indeed, the entire history major really gave me the insight I was seeking. Was it just exercise for my fingers as I painfully hammered out page after page on my portable Smith Corona?
This month’s Minnesota Medicine asks similar questions: Will studying medical history produce insights? Is all the digging worthwhile? For some, the pursuit is a detour from their medical career, as they exchange stethoscope for the stacks and scalpel for schoolbooks (p. 28). For others, it is a fanciful diversion, a chance to use photographic skills to record medicine’s past or to dredge up long-forgotten documentation of how medical practice use to be (p. 10). And for others, it is a chance to pen memories of a brush with a past epic event (p. 11).
A common experience of those who attempt do these ventures is the thrill of the hunt, scouring everywhere for that obscure bit of information, opening volumes nobody has cracked for decades, and being surprised by the discovery of unanticipated gems. Historians are a lot like scientists; they constantly generate hypotheses, track down facts, and revise those hypotheses. Tracking them is half the fun and discovery the rest. The Firestone Library had three underground levels that were inhabited by some strange denizens but held troves of dusty, fascinating arcana. Many of my forays there led to extended perusals of a book next to the book I was seeking.
But what about insight? Is studying medical history just an entertaining pastime, or is it pertinent to the serious pursuit of medical practice? Knowing about aspirin’s discovery from willow bark or the source from which ultrasound evolved may not help me order aspirin appropriately for my patient or understand the echocardiogram report that crosses my desk; but it does let me know that today’s medical wonders didn’t spring fully formed from some mysterious fount only yesterday. Without the perspective of history, all we have is today—a mere glance at the surface of things.
I have never second-guessed my decision to major in history, although I did have to pack in my pre-med courses between my history requirements. My thesis didn’t clear up the Vietnam quagmire, but I emerged from my dive into historical research knowing that the agony in the Vietnam jungles of 1970 was germinating at the Geneva tables in 1954.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org.