Abstract
Dr. Bowen Eacritt Taylor attended medical school at the University of Nebraska and took part in the most advanced era to date of modern medicine. By the 1940s, gone were the hucksters that peddled patent medications that demeaned and vilified the doctor as a charlatan; now the AMA was an organization that had the power to lobby Washington and to protect its membership. It was a new time.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to Terry Taylor, Katy, Texas, who related this family story about his grandfather, Dr. Bowen E. Taylor (1919–2011).
- 2.
Some scholars have suggested that during the early twentieth century, medicine was the most open, and least criticized, the profession has ever been; while it might be suggested that the second half of the twentieth century, though marred by giant pharmaceutical conglomerates and medical malpractice suits, could be characterized as the era of collegiality. For the time being, globalization has eclipsed the notion of nationalism. See: Gabriel [2].
- 3.
Globally speaking, for instance, doctors in China remain some of the most maligned and disrespected professionals. Great contrast to the shift that has occurred in the West; that said, there are some real success stories where U.S. doctors went to China and turned around some troubled hospitals. Thanks to Dr. William C. Mayborn for this information.
- 4.
The important role played by pharmacists, before 1950, can be seen in popular culture, especially in the scene from Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, where the young George Bailey saves his employer Mr. Gower, the pharmacist, from killing a patient. Taking place in 1919, Mr. Gower was grief-stricken after learning that his son had just died from the Great Influenza, and proving the power of the compounding pharmacy, mixes poison into a customer’s order. George stops him, but in the dream sequence with Clarence the Angel, He was not there to keep Mr. Gower from killing the patient, and from losing his business. Interestingly, the actor, H.B. Warner, who played Mr. Gower, went to medical school for a time before dropping out to become an actor. See: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/202080%7C64520/H-B-Warner/ (Accessed on May 30, 2016).
- 5.
See Michael Lewis. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016). Lewis examines the work of two Israeli psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who influenced the development of behavioral economics by arguing why we should not trust human intuition. Specifically, Lewis, in “Going Viral” outlines the ways in which evidence-based research in medicine influenced the decision-making process for diagnosing patients. This is particularly applicable to the studies that were carried out with aspirin to this day (Chap. 8) pages 212 – 237.
- 6.
Mount Sinai Hospital, where Harvey Weiss conducted most of his research, is an excellent example of a hospital that combined hospital services and doctor’s offices. Founded in the nineteenth century, it was the second Jewish medical center in the country. After adding the Berg Research Laboratory after 1945 (Fig. 5.1), by the late 1960 s it opened a medical school that began to graduate some of the top students in the country. To this day, it is one of the leaders in medical research and care in the United States.
- 7.
Sir John Vane (1927–2004) was a pharmacologist at the Royal College of Surgeons of England who worked with Priscilla Piper, a graduate student at the University of London. Henry Collier, a biochemist at Parke Davis, referred her to Vane, after hearing about his path-breaking research. Vane received the Noble Prize in Medicine in 1982 for his work with aspirin and prostaglandins, and was knighted by the queen. He did not do any of his research alone though, and could not have achieved such results without the help of Piper and many others.
- 8.
This is the same Bristol-Myers that developed Bufferin, Bayer’s rival beginning in the 1950s, and merged in 1989 with another nineteenth century pharmaceutical company called the Squibb Corporation.
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Rooney, S.M., Campbell, J.N. (2017). Aspirin and the Doctor’s Office. In: How Aspirin Entered Our Medicine Cabinet. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54615-5_5
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