Hal Hellman: Great feuds in medicine

As in his earlier Great Feuds in Science, Hellman shows how controversy and bitter disagreement often drive the advancement of knowledge, and how human frailty can lie behind the most laudable achievements.

Here, in his solid yet lively style, he tells 10 stories of crucial moments in medicine, including the discovery of blood's circulation around the body by 17th-century anatomist William Harvey; Viennese obstetrician Semmelweis' insistence that doctors wash their hands before attending childbirths, for which he was vilified, ending up in a mental asylum; Pasteur's development of the germ theory of disease; the tragic feuding between two scientists who, if they had been able to get along, could well have shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA; and the destructive bitterness between two Aids researchers.

Wiley

$59.95