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One fresh spring afternoon twelve years ago, a stout, bald American and a compact, bright-eyed young Swiss lingered over lunch in Leipzig's famed Auerbach's Keller. "This is the place," said Dr. William Henry Welch, dean of U. S. pathologists, shifting his big cigar to the other side of his mouth, "where my career started.'' He told how he had met great Dr. John Shaw Billings in Auerbach's Keller half a century before, how he and Billings had worked to establish at Johns Hopkins the first modern medical school in the U. S. Then he launched into a glowing description of Johns Hopkins' new Institute of the History of Medicine and the library that was to bear his name.
As he listened, Professor Henry Ernest Sigerist, who w:as then teaching history of medicine at the University of Leipzig, little realized that the major phase of his career was starting in Auerbach's Keller. Five years later, a short time before he died, old Dr. Welch asked Dr. Sigerist to succeed him as head of the History of Medicine Institute.
Before he accepted. Dr. Sigerist carefully explored the great medical centres of New York City, Chicago. Boston. Philadelphia, San Francisco and institutions in smaller towns. He studied history, economics and folkways, wrote home poetic letters on the bright beauty of New England autumn, the "whiplash" of Colorado winds. He found the U. S. "a great world, a gigantic historical process, strange and alluring," and felt that medicine's centre of gravity was shifting from Germany to the U. S. So he finally decided to settle down at Hopkins.
Henry Sigerist is considered by many to be the world's greatest medical historian. He reads 14 languages, has taught and lectured from Cornell University to Zurich, is an expert on such things as medieval prescriptions and the 16th-Century treatment of gunshot wounds. To Dr. Sigerist, however, medicine is not only a science whose triumphs are technical improvements, but a service whose success is measured by the ability of a small group of men to make mankind's life more livable. Even in his first enthusiasm over the U. S., Dr. Sigerist felt medical care was unevenly distributed, that physicians had not yet found their proper place in a complex new society. In the early 1930's he became known to U. S. physicians as an articulate apostle of socialized medicine. No man's arguments are read by either side of the socialized medicine controversy with greater respect.