Excerpt from An Alabama Student and Other Biographical Essays To a lifelong interest in biography as a recreation I have added a strong conviction of its value in educa tion; and so it has happened that for the occasional address a biographical subject was often chosen. Of those here collected, all of which have already appeared in the journals, more than half deal with aspects of the life of physicians in the United States. In what better way could I show gratitude for the extraordinary kindness experienced during twenty-one years than by a constant appeal to the students to take as their models the great men of the profession of their own country? In no age and in no land have the Hippo cratic ideals been more fully realized than in some of the lives here portrayed. Pictures such as these, de tached as many of them are from each other, have but one value to the student - to waken that precious quality of human sympathy which may enable him to appreciate that in the simple annals of such a career as the 'alabama Student' a life may be as perfect as in a Harvey or a Locke. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then, medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue.