Introduction

Sigerist was born in 1891 in Paris, the son of Swiss parents. After schooling in Paris and Zurich he began studies of oriental languages in Zurich and London, then studied medicine in Zurich and Munich. Immediately after obtaining his MD in 1917 he entered the field of the history of medicine as a result of his being encouraged by Karl Sudhoff in Leipzig, the doyen of medical historians. For eight years Sigerist was an independent scholar in Zurich, stimulated by some of his teachers and, above all, by his cooperation with colleagues such as Sudhoff, Charles Singer, and Arnold C. Klebs. He became a lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Zurich, giving courses and guiding doctoral students. The considerable number of papers and edited books were proof of his productivity and success at this early stage. No wonder, therefore, that in 1925 he was called to fill the leading chair of medical history as the successor of Karl Sudhoff at the University of Leipzig. In Leipzig, as professor and director of a department, Sigerist’s possibilities widened and so did the range of his interests. The Leipzig Institute, which had been Sudhoff’s realm, now attracted ever more students and co-workers and opened up to international communication with medical historians and other intellectuals. Sigerist even succeeded in being independent of, and peacefully co-existing with, the authoritarian and vain Sudhoff, who was still present in the Institute. Sigerist also managed things successfully in spite of the difficult political and economic situation in post-World War I Germany. Part of his success was due to his abilities as an organizer. In addition to a variety of publications, Sigerist wrote his three most personal books in Leipzig: Man and medicine, Great doctors, and American medicine. It was also in Leipzig that Sigerist came into personal contact with the foremost American medical historians such as William H. Welch, Fielding H. Garrison, and Harvey Cushing. These contacts led to an invitation for a lecture tour in the United States for the winter of 1931/32 where Sigerist met many American colleagues, gave lectures from coast to coast, and studied American medicine in action. His hosts were so impressed that the Johns Hopkins medical faculty offered him the Chair of the History of Medicine and thus the succession of Welch. Back in Leipzig, Sigerist realized that his chances in the United States were clearly superior to those in Germany with its rapidly deteriorating political situation shortly before the Nazis seized power. Sigerist’s most important time began in 1932 as William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He re-organized teaching, built up a staff of both Americans and exiled European victims of Nazism, and secured the means for the necessary budget. Contacts with the Old World were maintained by spending every summer of the 1930s in Europe, although he never returned to Germany. After his experiences in Germany, and as a liberal democrat, the way of life in America was much to his liking. He continued the research on mediaeval medicine he had begun in Zurich and Leipzig. However, his work soon covered the whole of the history of