Edited by Roger Maltby
Royal Society of Medicine
Press, 2002, £19.50,
paperback
ISBN: 1 85315 512
8
Rating:
***
At
first glance, an uncharitable observer may wonder whether historical
figures from anaesthesia are notable. But some of the names do ring
bells immediately: Apgar, Ringer, and Trendelenberg are names that
should have meaning for most clinical
students.
Why should this not just
be yet another exercise in train spotting? You may disagree, but many
find that a knowledge of the people that made the discoveries that we
take for granted, and the way in which those discoveries were made, can
make learning facts less dry.
Take
Virginia Apgar (1909-74), for example. In the year that she was
appointed first woman professor of anaesthesia at Columbia University,
she was having breakfast with some medical students in the hospital
canteen. One of them asked how to evaluate a neonate. “She
reached for a piece of paper, scribbled down a scoring system of 0, 1,
or 2 for each of the five signs (heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle
tone, reflex irritability, and colour) and hurried to the labour ward
to test it.”
In
todays medical schools it is hard to imagine a professor having
breakfast with students in the first place. Apgars entry
includes other fascinating insights. She funded her way through college
by catching stray cats for a zoology lab, and had an uphill struggle in
what at the time was very much a male dominated profession. In her
spare time she built a viola and other string
instruments.
What is yet more
amazing about this paperback, which comes in surgical green, is that
many of the “notable names” are still alive. Some of you
may even have met them. For wannabe anaesthetists who would like some
background on their aspirations this is a must. For the rest of us,
this can definitely be something that is entertaining to dip into.
