An American Doctor's Odyssey: Adventures in Forty-Five Countries

Rating:
Summary: Insights from the Past into Modern Medical Care
Review: This book has been one of my favorites for many years. I read it first in paperback, and after that fell apart I managed to find a used hardback copy. The book is the autobiography of Victor Heiser, M.D. The book starts with a bang with Heiser as a teenager surviving the Johnstown flood. (His parents were killed.) The rest of the book is mostly anecdotes taken from his medical career. Dr. Heiser is perhaps the ultimate example of the international public health doctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He spent much of his career as the U.S.'s Director of Health in the Philippines. Much of the book is organized by disease: he discusses smallpox, plague, cholera, leprosy, hookworm, etc. Heiser's main point is that health comes mostly from vaccination, clean water, good food, sanitation, and isolation of people sick with contagious diseases, not from expensive medical care.
Nearly every page of the book has a great story; you get the impression that Heiser must have been a fantastic dinner guest. Heiser's stories of vaccinating the uncivilized tribesmen of the Philippines are medical adventure at its best.
Towards the end of his career Heiser became a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation and spent his time traveling the world selling public health to the masses. The book bogs down a bit here; sometimes you wish Heiser would stop bragging about the number of times he's visited each country and tell more stories.
For the modern reader, Heiser's book is still surprisingly relevant, though maybe not in ways he intended. Heiser and other public health doctors are perhaps the persons most responsible for today's overpopulation of the earth. The fact is that if you save a life, you must prevent a birth somewhere else, or risk overrunning your resources. Heiser had no concept of limits. In my opinion, today's doctors have for the most part still never understood this, with the result that they often cause more harm than good.
Another important point for modern readers is the concept of diminishing returns for medical care. Heiser's book shows this clearly. Heiser, who was starting with Philippine peasants that had never seen a doctor, could save thousands of lives with a few dollars' worth of vaccines. Today we may spend a million dollars on a single transplant patient or premature baby. Are we really getting our moneys' worth? I don't think so.
Overall, a very good book if you can find it.

Rating:
Summary: don't pull an all nighter reading in to the sun on a bicycle
Review: Land of the midnight sun.

Reverries.. WBYEATS sailing to byzantium innisfree

The technical mind, AgFd ACS, FSEEE

Medical doctors... Captian Doctor a natural history of the dead

Woodger

Fleming?

debakey, barnard, cooley, howard, christian, denton

medical doctors

Enjoy reading literature written by medical doctors.

MD magazine had short stories also

beware the pogonip





Medical doctors are deft, adept intellectual academic readers thus, also literati.

Nielson's 4th, The Inextinguishable rowing scull to Jupiter and
Beyond.

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