Historian

Last week Dr. Henry E. Sigerist of Switzerland became professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Because there are comparatively few chairs of the history of medicine in U. S. universities and because Dr. Sigerist is primarily an historian rather than a physician, his appointment was of particular interest to medical men. More important, he is the man chosen to succeed U. S. Medicine's venerable "dean," Dr. William Henry ("Popsie") Welch, 82, as head of Johns Hopkins' expensive Institute of the History of Medicine.

In Europe are some 20 institutes of medical history. Dr. Sigerist has held two chairs, at the Universities of Zurich and Leipzig. In the U. S. the teaching of medicine's history has been largely a labor of love. At the University of Maryland Dr. Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell held one of the earliest chairs in the country, but it was discontinued at his death in 1913. At Temple University, Philadelphia, Dr. Victor Robinson teaches medical history, publishes Medical Life, the only English language monthly devoted exclusively to the subject. Dr. Irving Samuel Cutter teaches the history of medicine at Northwestern University, Dr. Morris Fishbein at the University of Chicago, Dr. G. Canby Robinson at Cornell Medical College, New York City; Dr. Edward Clark Streeter gives extramural instruction at Harvard. There are a half-dozen histories of medicine by U. S. authors and perhaps a dozen other men who give instruction to groups in various schools. But there are few full-time jobs.

Dr. Sigerist's job will be distinctly a full-time one. He will have the facilities of the Welch Medical Library, which was established with the institute and now has some 100,000 volumes, including the collection of the late great William Osier and a first edition of William Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood (1628). The librarian is Dr. Fielding Hudson Garrison.

Big, broad, jovial and aggressive, Dr. Sigerist is just half the age of the man he succeeds--41. Born in Paris of Swiss parents, he studied philology before medicine, specialized in Oriental languages. He speaks and thinks in German, French, Italian, English, can write in most of the others. He spent the four War years in the Swiss army, was graduated in medicine from Zurich in 1921 at the age of 30. Three years later he became professor of medical history there. The next year he went to Leipzig, remained there until Johns Hopkins got him. He has travelled over most of the world with a hip-pocket camera. He develops his pictures in his bathroom. But his lectures are prepared to appeal to the ear. Says he: "Too many lectures read well in print and prove disappointing when read from a platform."

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