First Patients

Highly recommend. Dr. Rod Tachanco has accomplished a rare feat; he has written a history of scientific and medical discovery that privileges the human dimension of discovery, that is, the personal stories, the emotions, the motivations, and aspirations that led men and women to seek out new treatments for diseases or to, serve as human guinea pigs for experimental drugs and procedures. As a result, the doctors, the patients, and their families come to life on these pages—the farmer who vaccinated his family members against small pox by infecting them with cow pox years before scientist realized that those who contracted and survived cow pox were immune to smallpox; the wife who badgered a surgeon to advance a new technology (the pacemaker) to save her husband’s life, the doctors who attempted (and eventually succeeded) infecting themselves with yellow fever to discover the carrier of the disease, the young mother who became the first patient treated with penicillin, and many more.

Each chapter relates the story of the doctors and the patients behind various major medical milestones, such as the development of a smallpox vaccine, the discovery and application of blood transfusion as a medical treatment, advances in malaria treatment, the discovery, manufacture, and use of penicillin in the treatment of infection, the advent of the defibrillator, and the AIDs epidemic, Although arranged chronologically according to when the medical milestone took place, the chapters can be read either in order of presentation or as discrete units.

While many may dismiss this history, thinking that they already know the stories of these discoveries, this would be a huge mistake. Since by probing "the ordeal of real people caught in unique medical dilemmas," the author has breathed life into the cold, objective accounts found in textbooks.