Inspired by stumbling across the true story of a doctor who, in 1958, had saved a heart patient’s life with the aid of a pacemaker he had designed using a Kiwi shoe polish can as a mold, Rod Tanchanco set about investigating other milestones in medicine. His focus was on the patients that were at the crux of each moment reasoning that, in line with his own training as a physician, the importance of getting the patient’s story right is at the essence of fully understanding the clinical issue. FIRST PATIENTS, subtitled “the incredible true stories of pioneer patients”, introduces the reader to intriguing characters, including the first boy to be revived by a defibrillator and the fifteen-year-old who became a victim of AIDS in 1968, decades before the virus was even named. Tanchanco relays the story of the first woman to be dosed with penicillin in 1942. And, in one of many fascinating asides that appear throughout the book, he reveals that at that time the vial containing 5.5 grams of penicillin, enough to treat just one patient, represented the entire stockpile of the medicine in the USA.

Alongside these pioneer patients are the doctors and scientists that treated them. Often discovering new procedures and techniques through a mix of intuition, luck and inspiration these were innovators that weren’t afraid to experiment and take risks. The English farmer who saw the link between the agricultural disease cowpox and smallpox and instigated the first vaccination scheme. The US “mosquito men” who infected themselves with yellow fever in Cuba in order to find a way to combat the virus. FIRST PATIENTS is an exceptionally well written book. Presented chronologically, each chapter tells a self-contained story focusing on one particular patient and one critical turning point in the history of medicine. It is impeccably researched, fully referenced and benefits from the inclusion of a selection of apposite illustrations. Like the very best narrative non-fiction writers, Tanchanco is gifted with a prose style that provides clarity of information with the flow of a novelist. At times these historic cases read with the pace and excitement of a top notch medical thriller.

In the current era, where a worldwide pandemic has increased our knowledge and awareness of the pace of medical investigations and innovations, FIRST PATIENTS–clearly written and beautifully presented–arrives as a particularly absorbing account of historic scientific success that serve to highlight the continued evolution of medicine and the advancement of science.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader