Description

In many cases, literary fame has eclipsed memory of these authors' medical expertise: Most people today talk about Maimonides, Rabelais, Locke, Schiller, Keats, Conan Doyle, and Chekhov because of their literary works, not because they practiced medicine. But the lesser-known individuals are just as interesting in many ways: such people as Cadwallader Colden, the loyalist lieutenant governor of New York during the American Revolution, who wrote the first English history of the Iroquois; Margaret Georgina Todd, author of popular novels in the Victorian era, which promoted the idea of women in medicine; and Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher, who was not only a physician, researcher, and radiologist, but played a role in the Harlem Renaissance as an orator, musician, musical arranger, and literary figure.

In many cases, literary fame has eclipsed memory of these authors' medical expertise: Most people today talk about Maimonides, Rabelais, Locke, Schiller, Keats, Conan Doyle, and Chekhov because of their literary works, not because they practiced medicine. But the lesser-known individuals are just as interesting in many ways: such people as Cadwallader Colden, the loyalist lieutenant governor of New York during the American Revolution, who wrote the first English history of the Iroquois; Margaret Georgina Todd, author of popular novels in the Victorian era, which promoted the idea of women in medicine; and Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher, who was not...  Read More