HEROES OF MEDICINE

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Thomas Carlyle, more than 1 1/2 centuries ago, wrote that "history is the essence of innumerable biographies." Indeed, the literature of medicine introduces us to a cavalcade of colorful and intriguing characters, an assortment of personalities that prompted historian Fielding Garrison to remark that "all human life is there." And yet, as distinctive as each of its many outstanding innovators has been, through the many ages and places in which their discoveries were made, there is a sturdy thread of tangible traits that unites them all. Even during the past four decades, which have witnessed medical innovation on an unprecedented scale, that sturdy thread has not frayed. Nor has the rapidity of achievement--with the linear progress of yesterday succumbing to exponential acceleration--stretched it to the breaking point. If anything, the new science and its bedside applications have provided more evidence than ever before that certain tangible human characteristics inevitably accompany innovation.

A year ago, a special issue of TIME highlighted some of the biomedical advances of the late 20th century. This 1997 issue celebrates men and women who have contributed to those advances. Not all of the assemblage of healers presented here are doctors. Nurses, technical personnel and seekers of botanical remedies have also found the limelight. So has one committed American woman who donated her bone marrow to a desperately sick person whom she had never met. When she was asked what moved her to come forward, and how she could tolerate the weeks of soreness and fatigue that follow the marrow harvesting, her reply was unassuming. She did it, she says, because "there's no choice. You're talking about saving somebody's life."

Though she is not a healer by profession, the altruistic donor is imbued with the same stimulus, the same motivation, that has driven medical pioneers throughout history. The force that leads men and women to devote their lives to those who need help is their simple realization that, for them personally, there is no choice. More than a career, this has been their calling.

No matter what other goals it may achieve, the medical profession has always maintained as its ultimate mission the relief of human suffering. Though the greatest of medical innovators have made their most important contributions for any combination of personal and professional reasons, the background against which their motivations play has never changed. It remains what it has been since earliest s: the constant mindfulness that individual people are enduring the effects of disease and that only through the intervention of others can their problems be addressed.

Modern medicine has grown by means of a tradition that is almost 2,400 years old. Its practices are said to have begun on the Greek island of Cos, near the western coast of Asia Minor, where a school arose around the teachings of the legendary Hippocrates. Today the name of Hippocrates is mentioned most frequently in discussions of the oath attributed to him. But the Hippocratic physicians did far more than introduce the principles from which the codes of today's medical ethics have developed.