cover image Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin 1798-1866

Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin 1798-1866

Amalie M. Kass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $34.95 (642pp) ISBN 978-0-15-171700-2

The brilliant and controversial English physician and Quaker who identified the lymph-nodes disease that bears his name is the subject of this richly detailed biography by Edward Kass, Harvard Medical School professor, and his wife, a medical-research librarian. Hodgkin was not only known as an innovative clinician and anatomic pathologist but also as an eminent ethnologist and anthropologist, as well as an energetic philanthropist. When politics drove him from the staff at London's Guy Hospital, he continued to exercise influence as a scientist, teacher and medical-education reformer, and as a member of numerous professional and charitable organizations. This champion of the poor and oppressed, whether Australian aborigines, North American Indians or former slaves seeking resettlement in Africa, died in Jaffa during a mission on behalf of persecuted Jews in the Mideast. (May)