Simon Baruch: rebel in the ranks of medicine, 1840–1921

Lists of these coinages have been separately published by King-Hele but it is good to have them spelled out here in conjunction with the detailed criteria involved. No one could know more about the doctor's originality, sources and impact than King-Hele; and the concordance must surely stand as a triumph of meticulous expertise. I would imagine it was compiled without a computer-King-Hele's easy intimacy with his 5,000 words speaks instead of a long and personal relationship. The volume offers an entirely auspicious start to the Occasional Publications series begun by the Wellcome Institute, from whose collections, one supposes, the very beautiful cover also derives. Biography as an art form that documents the life and times of one figure, is, unfortunately, a rarely used tool of the academic historian. Indeed, the eminent medical historian, Erwin H Ackerknecht, once complained "Every biography disfigures history". To some extent, of course, this is true. Biographers tend to be attracted more towards exceptional figures than to representative ones. Individual stories are frequently different from group experiences. On the other hand, as Patricia Spain Ward shows in her new biography of Dr Simon Baruch, it is possible to use such an exceptional figure to illustrate an individual life and how American medicine was taught, practised, and advanced from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Applying a chronological approach to the life of Simon Baruch, MD, Ward follows Baruch from his arrival in the United States as a Polish Jewish immigrant and his initial settlement in South Carolina. There, we learn of the medical training Baruch underwent and his experiences as a surgeon in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. From these events, she continues with young Simon Baruch's career in the rural South and the tempting call to the big city, New York, in 1880, and then with his well-known career as a practitioner, public health activist, and medical journalist for Charles A Dana's famed New York Sun. At the same time as covering these individual events, Ward takes great pains to discuss the pivotal changes occurring in medicine during this period as it tried to establish itself along new lines of scientific knowledge, professional requirements, and expectations. One of Baruch's best-known fields of inquiry and medical activism was his long-held faith in the curative powers of hydrotherapy. Ward assiduously covers Baruch's written work on the topic, his move to make public baths …