Journal of Medical Biography

Dr Konstantin Omiros Kalangos, a specialist in internal medicine, was well known in Yeşilköy, a district of Istanbul, for providing long-term care and offering free treatment to patients with limited financial means. His family background included multiple individuals across generations who received medical training and practiced medicine. During the period from the 1950s to the 2000s, when he practiced in Yeşilköy, he treated thousands of patients in the ground-floor clinic of his family's residence. In an era increasingly dominated by technological diagnostics, he maintained that medical assessment was impossible without physical contact, placing the physical examination and direct physician–patient interaction at the centre of diagnosis. Oral history interviews conducted in Yeşilköy repeatedly highlight his compassion, clinical expertise, and ethical commitment; many residents remember him as a physician who embodied the values associated with the Hippocratic Oath. This study examines the life, professional practice, and cultural impact of Dr Kalangos. It draws on materials from the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, the Directorate of State Archives, the Ottoman Archives (BOA), the Ayastefanos Greek Church Archives, family papers, oral history interviews, patient ledgers, handwritten medical lecture notes, and relevant secondary literature.

Ni Dashi (倪大石, 1925–2022) was a Chinese microbiologist who developed an immunotherapy for epidemic haemorrhagic fever (EHF) in China between 1985 and 1988. Since 1950s, China had been plagued by this disease, urging scientists to dedicate themselves to virus isolation and the exploration of specific treatments. Among them, Ni and his team led the isolation of the virus in China. Building on this breakthrough, Ni developed a transfer factor derived from virus-immunized porcine spleens to modulate patients’ immune responses and alleviate their symptoms. This essay reawakens recognition of Ni's significant yet overlooked contribution to the development of immunotherapy for EHF.

Lorenzo Martini (1785–1844) was a physician devoted to promoting hygiene and preventive health. He combined clinical practice with public engagement and relied on both documentary records and debates to shape his practical advice. After a brief biographical profile, we turn to a close reading of the hygiene section of his Manuals of Hygiene and Medical Police (1835) and we examine how that part seeks to disseminate concrete hygienic practices among the population. The study rests on the original 19th-century edition of the Manual as a primary source, with other primary documents in the Historical Archives of the University of Turin and the State Archives of Genoa, and it is supported by secondary sources that help reconstruct Martini's life and situate his ideas within the medical culture of his time. Martini presents prevention as the primary route to protect health, and he argues that the best way to avoid or at least reduce the risk of chronic diseases is to maintain a general state of balance across all aspects of life, including daily habits, environment, diet. Traces of miasmatic and humoral theories of Hippocratic and Galenic origin remain in Martini's thought, showing how emergent preventive ideas coexisted with older medical doctrines.

Antonio de Tornay has been a subject of study in the last decade, in particular his medical work designed to treat the ailments of García Álvarez de Toledo, 1st Duke of Alba. Of the series of texts written for this purpose, the one named Opúsculo de cozinas stands out. It is an ambitious project that completes a consilium and a regimen sanitatis written previously for the same figure. The brief treatise was originally divided into five parts, but only the first one, on the subject of different types of meat, survives. It includes a brief section on the way to carve meat in the French style. The objective of this study is to reconstruct the intellectual figure of Tornay and analyse his work from a medical and a historical perspective. These texts, far from anecdotal, exemplify some fundamental types of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine in the vernacular, aimed at treating specific ailments by adapting them to the needs of the courtly elites.

Ramon Emeterio Betances (1827–1898) stands out as a pivotal figure in the fields of ophthalmology and public health in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Trained in France, he returned to the island in 1856, where he treated cholera patients and introduced vital public health interventions. Known as ‘The Physician of the Poor’, Betances dedicated himself to serving marginalised populations, including enslaved individuals. He co-founded a secret abolitionist society and championed Puerto Rican independence, actions that resulted in multiple periods of exile. Together with his contemporaries, Betances helped lay the groundwork for ophthalmology in Puerto Rico, significantly advancing medical knowledge, improving public health infrastructure, and inspiring successive generations of clinicians. His enduring legacy is recognised for its profound medical, social, and political impact.

The story of John Elmer Weeks (1853–1949) is as impressive as it is inspiring. Based on a New Year's resolution with a friend, Weeks decided to pursue a career in medicine and worked as a full-time mechanic to fund his medical school preparation and admissions process. The field of ophthalmology, and the study of medicine at large, has much to thank for that fateful New Year's resolution. From culturing the Koch-Weeks bacillus, the causative agent of a form of infectious conjunctivitis, to publishing a landmark textbook titled “A Treatise on Diseases of the Eye,” Weeks has left his mark on the study of ophthalmology and medicine. Despite all these accomplishments, what may be most impressive is Weeks’ admirable sense of humility. Dr David W. E. Baird, the Dean of the University of Oregon Medical School, wrote about Dr Weeks: “It would be well for every medical student and every young doctor to learn as much as possible about Dr Weeks and to emulate his high qualities.” This biography, based on Weeks’ autobiography and archival materials at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), aims to accomplish Dr Baird's wish.

The physician, activist, essayist, radical free thinker, polyglot and first African American medical graduate James McCune Smith has for long been a forgotten figure. Despite extensive writings, a lack of oratory skills, when compared with those of his contemporaries, had relegated him to a lesser place in the pantheon of the abolitionist movement and overdue recognition. His education at Glasgow University provided a knowledge he applied not only to his medical practice and publications but also in his wider writings. In championing equality, emancipation and the abolition of slavery McCune Smith did not hold back in calling out pomposity, inaccuracy and the misrepresentation of facts by others, irrespective of their position or prominence. His forensic approach and knowledge of the medical literature of the times were evident from his student days to the last essays. This article addresses the formative years, exile in Glasgow to achieve the education denied in his homeland and his return to New York as a newly qualified physician.

Vancouver General Hospital has a rich neurosurgical history; however, little is documented of the role the institution played in the history of extracranial to intracranial (EC–IC) bypass as a surgical therapy. A review of the literature on the history of cerebrovascular neurosurgery was performed to augment a comprehensive personal interview provided by Dr Sydney Peerless to provide a new insight into the journey towards our contemporary understanding of bypass surgery. Along this timeline, we outline key historic figures and their contributions, as well as document the first small vessel EC–IC bypass at Vancouver General Hospital in western Canada.

Bernardino Genga of Mondolfo, Italy, a pioneer of surgical anatomy, taught and practiced in seventeenth-century papal Rome. He was a contemporary of Marcello Malpighi, father of microscopic anatomy and personal physician to Pope Innocenzo XII. When Malpighi died in 1694, his pupil Giorgio Baglivi performed an autopsy in the presence of Giovanni Maria Lancisi, a leading Roman physician and anatomist. Baglivi and Lancisi wrote the only reports known to date of the autopsy. Research in the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano uncovered an unpublished manuscript by Bernardino Genga describing Malpighi's autopsy. Genga's manuscript, compared in this paper with those of Baglivi and Lancisi, is historically significant because it reveals his presence at Malpighi's autopsy, demonstrating he was alive in 1694. This new evidence prompts a re-evaluation of Genga's unsettled chronology and the context of his latest works, previously deemed posthumous.

Sir Arthur William Mickle Ellis (1883–1966) was born, raised and educated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He had a distinguished medical career in North America and Europe which spanned important developments in medical research and education and culminated in appointment as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. He was a resident physician at the newly created Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute before the start of World War I. Serving with the Canadian Army Medical Corps in England, and responsible for the care of soldiers taken sick with highly virulent cerebrospinal meningitis, Ellis attempted an ambitious therapy and undertook laboratory investigations that impacted management of the disease directly. After the war, he became the Director of the Medical Unit and the first Professor of Medicine in the University of London at the London Hospital, and subsequently Regius Professor of Medicine in Oxford in World War II. As a research-driven academic physician, the career of Sir Arthur Ellis was influenced profoundly by Sir William Osler (1849–1919), the first Canadian to hold the position of Regius Professor in Oxford.

Having gained his medical education at Glasgow University, McCune Smith returned to New York City to establish himself. Difficulties in his acceptance were evidenced by the New York Academy of Medicine's refusal of membership and the New York Medical and Surgical Society preventing him from presenting in person at a meeting. He can claim the first peer-reviewed publication and presentation by an African American physician and interacted with both the elite of New York's medical establishment and his unqualified fellow African American colleagues. Whilst writing and lecturing on a range of medical topics, his most memorable achievements lie in the essays on climate, longevity, racial equality and civilisation. In each, he showed a mastery of quantitative analysis, physiology, comparative anatomy and the medical textbooks of the time. It is not just as a physician and pharmacist that he should be remembered but also as the foremost black social scientist of his era with an enquiring analytical approach learnt from and revealed in his Glasgow years. This article will examine his medical practice and writings as well as those essays that displayed his scientific knowledge.

Allen Kanavel possessed a protean skill set, excelling as an anatomist, clinical surgeon, surgical leader, surgical educator and surgical investigator. His investigations led to the foundation of a new surgical specialty, that of surgery of the hand. Additionally, he was a prolific author (>80 scientific articles, seven editions of his textbook Infections of the Hand). He also served as Chairman of Surgery at Northwestern University, President of the American College of Surgeons, of which he was a founding member, and he was also a charter member of the Society of Neurological Surgeons. In addition, he was a kind and humble person, and a devoted husband and father.

A slim 75-page ‘book,’ The Production of Antibodies: A Review and a Theoretical Discussion was published 84 years ago, in 1941. The authorship is normally attributed to Francis MacFarlane Burnet (1889–1985), 1960 Noble Laureate for his research on acquired immune tolerance and acknowledged as the most famous Australian scientist. A revised edition in 1949 was co-authored with Frank Fenner (1914–2010), another distinguished Australian virologist, best remembered for the elimination of smallpox in Australia and for control of the rabbit population. The curiosity and the topic of this paper is that three collaborators are listed on the title page of the 1941 book – Mavis Freeman, A. V. (Alan Vaughan) Jackson and Dora Lush. All three worked with Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne between 1936 and 1939/1940 during which time they were co-authors on 25 research papers. Who were these collaborators, what did they contribute to the book and why the confusion over authorship? This journey takes us into research on influenza, poliomyelitis, smallpox, myxomatosis, herpes, Q fever and scrub typhus undertaken by brilliant scientists who contributed to important advances in virology and immunology with one tragic consequence.

Alexander Blackrie (bap. 1702, d. 1772) was a Scottish Surgeon-Apothecary who attended Aberdeen's grammar school and Marischal College. He served as surgeon-general in India and practised at Bromley, Kent, England. In later life, he suffered from the ‘gravel and stone’ i.e., urological stones. This triggered an enquiry into the lucrative medication of Dr Chittick of Bath. Blackrie deduced it to be nothing more than soap-lye (Sodium hydroxide) and went on to formulate his own version (‘Blackrie's lixivium’). Blackrie undertook comparative experiments on the efficacy of these two products at dissolving equally-sized fragments of the same urinary stone. In 1763, he published his proposal to compare the two products in patients. This called for: selection of patients ‘afflicted in the same degree’, randomisation by ‘dividing them equally by lot', the ‘experiment’ to be ‘repeated’ and the number of participations to be ‘large’. Although never implemented, Blackrie's proposal is an early model of a randomised controlled trial and may be the first description of a non-inferiority trial. His use of the term ‘decisive’ experiment and reference to James Jurin FRS may offer a link with Hauksbee the Younger's 1743 proposed ‘experimentum crucis’. Blackrie's contribution to the development of fair comparisons of treatments deserves greater recognition.