Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: In this book, distinguished Greek physician and scientist Haralampos M. Moutsopoulos introduces readers to his own life in what would be traditionally identified as an "autobiography," but is actually more of an open-microphone conversation, meditation, and stream of consciousness on a career in medicine. It presents like a novel about what life was like in medicine in the 20th century and how it compares in the early 21st century.
Purpose: According to the book, the author seeks to "inspire young students and physicians to achieve excellence in medical knowledge ... while instilling in them a sense of responsibility and a code of medical ethics."
Audience: The audience of this book is as large as the world of curious readers, be they high school students, university students considering applying to medical school, advanced scientists, historians, or lay readers interested in the present-day world.
Features: The narrative follows the author from his native town to his current achievement "to the top," as he says, with his election as Chair of Medical Sciences-Immunology in the Science Section of the Academy of Athens. Step by step, we follow the author, with all the hopes, delusions, efforts, polemics, and other battles he had to wage to pursue his vocation and research, including developing departments and institutes of pathophysiology and, particularly, investigating autoimmune diseases. The book also details the author's experience of collecting paintings, becoming the Chair of the Board of the National Library of Medicine, returning to science and medicine, and contributing to medical regulation in Greece through official instances. The book describes a multifaceted life dominated by a passion for research, a desire to build structures allowing for research, and an illustration of medical ethics and research.
Assessment: The autobiographic genre is a difficult, dangerous, and perilous exercise, with a fine line between self-indulgence and humility. The author of this book succeeds in avoiding both. He hides neither his ambitions (for example, to become an academician as early as his 40s) nor the obstacles, difficulties, and limitations he met. The tone is simple and conversational with a very precise recollection of the actual facts, clearly revealing a historical consciousness similar to a laboratory notebook in which a scientist accurately documents his experiments on a daily basis. The narrative is nonetheless lively and attractive, as the author reports conversations in a direct style with complementary black-and-white pictures showing the author in action. The result is a narrative that reads like a novel and should be among the required readings in medical schools, colleges of pharmacy, and faculties of science.
