If asked to name famous doctors in medicine’s long and tempestuous history, what would you say? Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Maimonides, Vesalius, Harvey, Lister, Osler, Cushing, Salk?

When I recently put this question to a class of third year medical students, I was disheartened to hear their first answer: Harold Shipman, the British general practitioner who murdered more than 200 patients and hanged himself in prison in 2003. The next most popular answer was Gregory House, a brilliant though mischievous, cynical, and quite fictional character of the popular American television series House.

A few days ago, I attended a surgical conference in London. A distinguished professor of surgery, who qualified in the first half of the 20th century, showed a chest x ray to the audience. “We used to see a lot of this in the 1940s, when I was a house surgeon,” he reminisced. With an austere nod of the head, he asked an unsuspecting junior doctor …