The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease

Originating in the prestigious Joanne Goodman Lecture Series, and drawing on the author’s series of award-winning books, The Making of Modern Medicine explores the foundations of medicine through three case studies that elucidate turning points in the evolution of health care. Michael Bliss first sketches the religiously-based attitudes of fatalism that enveloped the Montreal of 1885 during the last great epidemic of smallpox in the Western world. He then traces the scientific, research-based approach to disease of the Canadian-born doctor William Osler, practicing at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The final study reveals how the values that Osler espoused helped to inspire those who discovered insulin at the University of Toronto. In a provocative epilogue, Bliss reflects on how these events have contributed to our current anxieties about and attitudes towards health care. A tour de force, The Making of Modern Medicine is an essential summation of the work of Canada’s leading historian of medicine.