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THE DOCTOR'S DOCTOR: A BIOGRAPHY OF EUGENE A. STEAD, JR., M.D. John Laszlo, MD, and Francis A. Neelon, MD Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006, 346 pp., $50.00 (hardcover).
This is an admiring but not hagiographic life of a distinctive figure in American medicine, written by two of his acolytes. The authors of this biography fulfill their intention, and their work allows us to comprehend a man who was hard to know.
Eugene Stead made his mark in the mid-20th century, a time when great men (and these individuals were almost all male) crafted great careers as leaders in teaching, research, and patient care, and achieved great fame. Stead's students and colleagues led arduous lives and felt rewarded, because "Stead was the person to whom competent professors and students and residents turned when they got stuck on a problem [and because of ] his message, his approach to the educational process, his single-minded insistence upon excellence." He was a critical, ambitious, and competitive man, a physician who created one of our country's finest departments of medicine at Duke University, one of the towering figures who led the field in the 1950s and 1960s, a type of era unlikely to appear again.
During his time
There was not yet the proliferation of deans, or layers of hospital bureaucrats regulating bed occupancy, patient turnover, and financial bottom lines-goals often achieved at the expense of learning, service, and even honesty. (p. ix)
He became a famous man, but his view was "I've always said I wouldn't walk across the street for fame." I chose to review this biography because, as a next generation physician, I knew of him. To me and to my contemporaries he was a figure to admire. But what is fame? Eugene Stead's son, William W. Stead, says: "He's terribly correct about the fleeting nature of fame ; most of present day people at the [Duke] Medical Center don't know who he is. That is unbelievable to me and yet so it is." Few people active in medicine today remember the name, a phenomenon I confirmed by polling 10 consecutive physician colleagues, asking each, "Who is or was Eugene Stead?" The results are as follows:
Age Response
52 Never heard of him
59 I don't...