Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine

POWEL H. KAZANJIAN, MD, PhD is a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical Center and a professor in the department of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1    Frederick Novy and the Origins of the Michigan Hygienic Laboratory2    What Novy Did in His Medical School Laboratory3    Making Medical Education Scientific4    Defining Bacteriology as a Discipline in Its Early Years5    Significance for American Culture: Arrowsmith6    Making a Scientific Career in MedicineConclusionNotesIndex

"The 'hero narrative' of science that honours stars such as Isaac Newton and Marie Curie often obscures the multitudes who lay the foundations – that centuries-old chain of curious minds. In this biography, physician and historian Powel Kazanjian pulls one from that multitude into the light: microbiology pioneer Frederick Novy. Kazanjian's detailed and authoritative account reveals how Novy (1864-1957) did fundamental work that shaped the field's development, and introduced basic research into medical training." (Nature) "Novy has been unduly neglected by historians to date, and Kazanjian performs an important service in correcting this gap; Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine  is a well-written and timely piece that alters our understanding of the rise of biomedical teaching and research in the United States." - Scott H. Podolsky (Harvard Medical School and author of The Antibiotic Era) "Powel Kazanjian's Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine tells a critical, insightful, and overlooked story in the history of medicine and science.  It is a triumph of scholarship and narrative." - Howard Markel (author of An Anatomy of Addiction and When Germs Travel) "The great value of Kazanjian’s work is in providing a case study of how American medicine was made scientific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."  (Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences) "Kazanjian has given us a much desired account of a very significant career. His main point, that Novy’s bacteriology differed from the application-focused William Welchian science of public health, expands our knowledge of American medical bacteriology. It is well founded and important. The book expands our scope of what the history of medical bacteriology is all about." (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)