Granville Sharp Pattison: anatomist and antagonist 1791–1851

Although Spalding is incisive about such institutional developments and clear about the college's response to such major national changes in medical education as the impact of the 1910 Flexner report, he often overlooks opportunities to underscore the distinctively southern character of the education at MCG. For example, although he remarks upon the many kinship ties that joined generations of faculty at the college, he tends to dismiss these as mere nepotism. Yet such ties in the family-conscious South were an important (and seldom studied) feature of medical training and institutional life. Similarly, Spalding notes the admission of the first two Black students to MCG in 1967, but offers little perspective on the college's particular contribution to the 150 years of race relations bridged by this study. Readers are left to wonder about the extent to which Black people-as patients, experimental subjects, or alternative healers-were involved in the development ofMCG. Finally, this is not a study that has much to say about a medical college as a place of learning and healing. For all of his attention to changes in deans and struggles for money and image, Spalding does not concern himself with what went on in the lectures andlaboratories, nor does he characterize how students and faculty brought their medicine to the sick people who called upon them. Steven M. Stowe Indiana University