One of the best single-volume histories of medicine from the bibliographical point of view, mainly for 19th century and earlier material. A rather compressed work with much detail, this is really more of a reference work than something to read from cover to cover. Garrison had a special gift for distilling the complex lifetime achievements of great physicians into a few paragraphs. In his time he was the leading American authority on the subject and wrote many papers on various aspects of medical history. Those published in Bull. N. Y. Acad. Med., 1925-35 were collected under the title of Contributions to the history of medicine, New York, Hafner, 1966. Garrison saw his so-called Introduction through four editions, the last of which appeared in 1929. That edition was frequently reprinted. See the biography by S.R. Kagan, Boston, 1948. See also "Fielding H. Garrison: the man and his book," by G. H. Brieger, Trans. Stud. Coll. Phycns. Philad., Med. Sci., 1981, 3, 1-21.