When I was searching for a publisher for Foreign Legacies, Yumi Press, which specializes in English texts for medical institutions, told me they would be interested in having such a text if it dealt with famous medical people.  Being an amateur historian, I decided to accept the challenge, and, after consultation with the publisher, came up with a list of fourteen medical pioneers.  Unlike the other publishers, which gave me a free hand, Yumi Press had hard and fast ideas about how they wanted the textbook lessons organized.  That was not a problem. I did not want to impose any more on Mitsuko, who helped me with the Japanese sections in the previous two texts, so I requested the services of Shigeru Mori,  Professor of English in Oita University’s Faculty of Medicine. We worked well together, and the result is an English reading text for use by Japanese English teachers at medical institutions that gives students a sense of medical history, and, hopefully, inspires them to uphold the ideals of the fourteen medical greats covered in the book.

This textbook introduces 14 men and women who laid the foundation for today’s modern medicine.  Although this textbook is written for medical students, it can be used as an English textbook for non-medical students, as many of the people introduced in the book are well known figures who made a variety of contributions to medicine from the 19thcentury to the present day.  The 14 people are: Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, Clara Barton, Elizabeth Blackwell, Robert Koch, Wilhelm Roentgen, Elizabeth Anderson, Hideyo Noguchi, Marie Curie, Albert Schweitzer, Benjamin Spock, Jonas Salk, Maurice Hilleman, and Barry Marshall.   Each person is introduced in about 350 words and exercises are attached at the end of each chapter.

Dr. Barry Marshall, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, 2005, came to Oita to give a lecture on H. pylori, so I was able to meet and talk to him.