The Medical Detectives

The author writes medical suspense that keeps you on the edge of your seat. I love this classical collection, perhaps the first to describe the discipline and epidemiological skills of medical detectives.

The book clearly shows the sudden arrival of epidemics, their high stakes, and the need to respond quickly and skillfully to limit the impact on society.

Ever since my seventh-grade science teacher used my flyaway hair to demonstrate static electricity, I have loved science, and I also like mystery stories. This classic collection of short pieces is a favorite in both arenas. It is like a true crime series in which the villains are microorganisms and molecules. Unraveling puzzles involving all manner of medical issues, from rabies to toxic chemicals, these case-study stories kept me riveted from beginning to end. Mostly written from the 1940s to the 1960s, they also touch on some shocking medical practices that one hopes are now outdated.

Long before Dr. Gregory House, there were the real-life doctors and scientists who were Berton Roueché’s perennial subjects. Roueché, a writer for the New Yorker for many years, reported on their dazzling detective work in the magazine’s “Annals of Medicine” columns. This volume collects two dozen of his most elegant pieces, which follow step by step the unraveling of a spate of medical mysteries: identifying the bewildering illness that affected residents of a small South Dakota town, discovering why a patient suddenly lost his sense of taste, fingering the ordinary but unlikely culprit that made a man turn orange, and… show more.