The Medical Detectives

by Berton Roueché

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Summary

"Roueché's writings have become unofficial textbooks for medical students, interns, practitioners, scientists, and for that matter anyone interested in human illness. They are engrossing, instructive, accurate, and marvelous fun to read, and the present collection represents Roueché at his best." — Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail.

All across the American landscape — in remote villages and small towns no less than in the great cities — strange illnesses, rare diseases, and sometimes the threat of contagion and even plague suddenly surface to bedevil an individual, a family, or a seemingly unrelated group of people. The local health authorities can discover nothing in personal histories or public medical records with which to define and counteract the threat, and the race is on. Find the clue that leads to the source of infection and its destruction before the victim worsens, or the unknown and possibly fatal disease threatens to spread.

Berton Roueché set out to portray some of the most significant and fascinating of those true life-and-death dramas, and nearly fifty of his Annals of Medicine narratives have appeared to date in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. The Medical Detectives brings together the very best of those modern classics in a memorable collection gathered from the 1940s through 1980.

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