Henry Ernest Sigerist

Background

Henry Ernest Sigerist was born April 7, 1891 in Paris, the son of Ernest Heinrich Sigerist and Emma Wiskemann. His father, a native of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, was in the shoe business. When the young Henry was ten years old, his father became mortally ill and the family returned to Zurich, his mother's native city.

Education

After graduating from the Literaturgymnasium in Zurich, a public school that emphasized studies in Greek and Latin, he entered the University of Zurich in 1910 as a student of oriental philology, studying Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit.

In 1911 he spent nearly a year at University College, London. When he returned to Zurich, he decided to study medicine. His training at Zurich (M. D. , 1917) was interrupted by nearly two years in the Medical Corps of the Swiss army.

Career

In the summer of 1914 he attended clinics at Munich, and at this time the idea of combining all his interests by pursuing the history of medicine occurred to him, although academic posts in the field were then almost nonexistent. After World War I, Sigerist studied at the Leipzig Institute for the History of Medicine with the eminent historian Karl Sudhoff, who directed his research to philological studies of medieval and medical manuscripts.

In 1923 he published Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur, an analysis of early medical formularies, written as his Habilitationsschrift to become a privatdocent at Zurich in 1921.

He became titular professor in 1924.

In 1923 Sigerist also published a critical edition of 549 Latin letters from Albrecht von Haller to Johannes Gesner that were in Zurich's Zentralbibliothe. To his surprise in 1925 he was offered Sudhoff's chair of medical history at Leipzig, the major medico-historical research center in the world. There between 1925 and 1932 his manifold talents in research and organization unfolded.

Without sacrificing scholarly standards and productivity he wrote general works like Einführung in die Medizin (1931), which was translated into six languages (English title, Man and Medicine, 1932) and Grosse Aerzte, sixty medical biographies used to interpret the evolution of modern medicine, considered by some his best work.

In post-World War I Germany, Sigerist's attention turned to the relationship between medicine and the social environment, the connection between poverty and disease, and the problems of providing medical care.

When he was invited in 1931 to lecture in the United States, he used the opportunity to write a history of American medicine from what he first called the sociological point of view and later the social history of medicine. Similarly he observed medical conditions in the Soviet Union during the summers of 1935 and 1936 and wrote Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937).

During his highly successful lecture tour in the United States, Sigerist was invited to become professor of the history of medicine and director of the new Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine in Baltimore as William H. Welch's successor.

The rising power of Hitler in Germany portended evil times and accelerated Sigerist's decision to move to America. Between the autumn of 1932 and 1947, when he resigned his Johns Hopkins chair, Sigerist's captivating personality and dynamic leadership shaped the future course of medico-historical studies and attitudes toward medical care in the United States.

With the assistance of Owsei Temkin, whom he brought from Leipzig, and Ludwig Edelstein, a Berlin classicist, he raised the standards of medico-historical scholarship in America, founded the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1933), and reorganized the American Association for the History of Medicine (founded 1925).

Tactfully and persuasively he helped many amateurs, encouraged professionals, and made the Johns Hopkins Institute the mecca of medical historians throughout the world. A popular lecturer and enthusiastic advocate of socialized medicine, he both attracted and repelled, becoming a controversial figure in the medical community.

His Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1938 (Medicine and Human Welfare, 1941) illustrated his intense concern with social problems, while his Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1940 (Civilization and Disease, 1943) demonstrated masterfully the interconnections of disease and the economic, social, religious, legal, philosophical, and cultural aspects of society.

In 1944 he served as medical planning consultant to the governments of Saskatchewan, Canada, and India, and he helped to found the American-Soviet Medical Society, becoming the first editor of the American Review of Soviet Medicine (1943 - 1944). He became an American citizen in 1943. During World War II, Sigerist struggled to keep his historical research going, although he was engulfed by administrative duties at the Johns Hopkins Institute and the Welch Medical Library, of which he had been named acting director. He became increasingly frustrated and embittered as his strength flagged, for he had begun to write an eight-volume social history of medicine as the culmination of his life's work.

Finally in 1947 he resigned from Johns Hopkins and settled near Pura, Switzerland, overlooking Lake Lugano. When news of his resignation spread, he was offered chairs at Jena, Zurich, Berlin, and Leipzig.

He chose to affiliate with Yale Medical School as research associate with freedom to live in Switzerland. But because of advancing cardiovascular disease he found it increasingly difficult to work, and only one volume and part of a second of his History of Medicine were completed. He was able to give the Heath Clark Lectures at the University of London in 1952. After struggling bravely to recover from a cerebral hemorrhage in October 1954 that impaired his speech, he died in Pura, Switzerland, two and a half years later.

Achievements

• A brilliant lecturer and facile writer, he made medical history attractive to students and public alike. Dr. Sigerist was influential in the creation of socialized medicine in Canada. Although Sigerist's influence waned during the mid 1900s, he has slowly become an important figure again in medical history.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Antike Heilkunde (German Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • A fifteenth century surgeon: Hieronymus Brunschwig and his work

    (Good hardcover. No DJ. ORIGINAL 1946 PRINTING. PAGES CLEA...)

  • Materia medica in the middle ages: A review
  • Sidelights on the practice of medieval surgeons

  • book

Connections

On September 14, 1916, he had married Emmy M. Escher; they had two daughters.

Father:

Ernest Heinrich Sigerist

Mother:

Emma Wiskemann

Spouse:

Emmy M. Escher