Frederick Novy And The Uplifting Of Medical Education

If you had seen Frederick Novy at the University of Michigan between 1888 and 1933, you might have dismissed him as an eccentric scientist in a threadbare suit and mismatched coat, careening across campus on his bicycle, oblivious to much except the thoughts in his head. You could have even shrugged at the way he holed up in his dim and cramped lab until late at night, poring over data and experiments, almost to obsession.

But to do so would be to miss his extraordinary contributions to medical science and the U-M Medical School at a time when medicine was lacking certainty and authority. As a student, Novy questioned treatments he was taught, such as bloodletting, cupping and the application of leeches. In his student notebooks and lecture notes, now archived at U-M’s Bentley Historical Library, he observed that there were no laboratory exercises to teach students how to investigate the cause of disease. To him, adding laboratory science would “lead to the uplifting of medical education that was needed.”

He became the leader of a new breed of physician: academic researchers who did not practice medicine. He would engineer new lab equipment to better see organisms on a cellular level, at a time when some of his U-M colleagues didn’t even believe in germ theory. And although he would tout the importance of scientific experiment for its own sake, without worrying about pragmatic application, his work would have profound effects on a deeper understanding of how germs and bacteria behave, leading to reduced incidents of dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis and