Francis W. Peabody entered medical school in 1903 and almost at once was recognized as an extraordinary human being. After a varied and exciting indoctrination in his profession, including responsibility for children ill with the dreaded poliomyelitis, an extensive medical trip to China, and an unintended role in the start of the Bolshevik Russian Revolution, he became the enormously successful chief of a new Harvard unit at the Boston City Hospital. The expectations for a long productive life were snuffed out by cancer six years later when he was only forty-five. Gifted in many spheres and possessed of great courage, his especial compassion and wisdom in patient care have made Peabody’s short life an inspiring legend for all time, an essential message for anyone who practices medicine, and an uplifting experience for any patient.

In a sensitively written biography, Dr. Paul brings to life Dr. Francis Peabody, a model physician whose guiding force was the care of the patient through understanding and love. This now legendary physician was active in the beginnings of three major medical institutions—the Rockefeller Hospital, the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory of the Boston City Hospital. A clinical scientist, an authority on typhoid fever and poliomyelitis, active in the China Medical Commission, he was also an eyewitness to Lenin’s Revolution in November 1917. His contemporaries described him as a beloved teacher ‘with an inner symmetry of intelligence and heart.’ Stricken with metastatic disease at age 44, he possessed his soul in peace, free of outward worry and anxiety, and with a reconciliation of biological and spiritual values. During the final weeks of his life, and despite the gravity of his condition, he wrote of his reactions to the injections of morphine, and of his concept of the roles of research, education, and patient care in a modern medical setting. This book, like Peabody’s life, is an inspiration.
-- Joseph E. Murray, 1991 Nobel Laureate in Medicine