New book highlights Oxford’s 900-year involvement in the development of medicine
25 November 2010
A new guide celebrates Oxford’s contribution to the development of medicine, highlighting more than 45 city sites of historic medical interest.Oxford Medicine: A Walk Through Nine Centuries, by Oxford alumnus and retired lecturer Dr Eric Sidebottom, takes visitors to 11 Oxford colleges in all, in addition to several departments, libraries and city museums.
The book celebrates the contributions of Baron Howard Florey and Sir Ernst Chain, two of three Nobel Prize winners credited with the development of penicillin. It also features Cecil Rhodes and Dr John Radcliffe, who both left large sums for medical development in Oxford.
Other attractions include the walk’s starting point, Magdalen College, which boasts medical landmarks spanning all nine centuries, and the Merton College library, which houses a 14th century manuscript of John of Gaddesden’s Rosa Medicinae, one of the first medical books by an English author.
The tour concludes at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology where Florey and Chain were based. Additional outlying sites include the Iffley Road Athletics Track where, in 1954, Sir Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four minute mile. Bannister graduated from Merton and his athletic feat overshadowed his career as a distinguished neurologist and head of Pembroke College.
Dr Sidebottom was prompted to research Oxford Medicine following the success of his walking tours of sites linked with Oxford’s medical past.
The first, for visiting American doctors, ‘set me thinking what a wonderfully scenic, and intellectually stimulating place the centre of Oxford is,’ he says.
He studied medicine at Corpus Christi and England’s first hospital, St Bartholomew’s in London, and held a succession of posts at Oxford University, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the Wellcome Trust.
‘Then I started to get interested in the history of pathology. If you look at disease through history, it has wrought havoc. You could claim that every war up until the Second World War was determined more by disease than by the enemy.
’Oxford has offered medical degrees since the thirteenth century and was the first British university to do so. Notable early scholars included Roger Bacon whose advocacy of the use of scientific experiments and, incidentally, healthy eating, more than 700 years ago broke new ground.
Oxford’s ‘most glorious time’ was the 1600s, however, when scientifically-inclined scholars met at Wadham College and eventually established the Royal Society in 1660.
Later, money left by Dr John Radcliffe on his death in 1714 helped pay for the Radcliffe Camera and Radcliffe Infirmary, where in 1941 the first trials of penicillin on humans took place. The hospital closed in 2007 after admitting patients for almost 250 years.
Dr Sidebottom lectures on the history of disease and among his favourite topics is what he calls ‘the true story of penicillin; the first spin story about medicine’ – the perception that Alexander Fleming alone discovered the antibiotic properties of the Penicillium notatum fungi.
‘Fleming realised that the mould produced something that killed bacteria, published a paper in 1929 but then dropped it. He didn’t see the implications for treating human infection.’
It was the work of Florey and Chain that developed penicillin as a treatment for disease. ‘It quickly became a miracle drug and lead to the antibiotic era.
’Dr Sidebottom foresees Oxford continuing to play a central role in major medical developments. ‘I’m looking forward with confidence to more important discoveries. It’s an exciting time to be in medicine. Oxford has many excellent scientists and doctors with good ideas and advanced technology, and is well equipped to face many quite challenging problems.’
For more details and signed copies of the book contact Dr Sidebottom at eric.sidebottom@path.ox.ac.uk.