This somewhat unique biography of Alfred Blalock, MD, by William P. Longmire, Jr, MD, Emeritus Professor of Surgery at UCLA, is based on the author's diary and on letters and interviews obtained from former residents, associates, family, and friends. It provides a valuable contribution to an understanding of one of the leading medical figures of this century. The nature of the account provides a different perspective from the account by Mark M. Ravitch, MD, The Papers of Alfred Blalock, and from any more definitive works in the future. Although publication has awaited the death of several major personalities, the work seems more current than retrospective. The book clearly benefits from the special and longstanding relationship between Long-mire and Blalock.
Blalock's life is traced through his childhood days in Georgia, college at the University of Georgia, Athens, and then medical school at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Md). Elements of his later