Richard Rapport, '65
Physician: The Life of Paul Beeson. Hardcover, 277 pages; Barricade Books, March 2001
From the New England Journal of Medicine: "Richard Rapport, a neurosurgeon, has written a fascinating and accurate account of the life of Paul Beeson, who rose to the highest levels of academic medicine not only because of his outstanding professional achievements but also because of his humility, compassion, personal charm, and remarkable sense of fairness. In tracing Beeson's life from his boyhood in rural Montana and Alaska to the present, Rapport also describes the revolutionary changes that occurred in the practice of medicine."
Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse. Hardcover, 240 pages,
W.W. Norton & Company, May 2005.
Rick Rapport is a neurosurgeon with the Group Health Cooperative of Puget
Sound in Seattle and the author of a previous medical biography, Physician:
The Life
of Paul Beeson.
According to one commentator, in writing the biography of Santiago Ramón
y Cajal, “Rapport gracefully tells the story about how an obscure professor in Spain,
looking through the microscope in his kitchen, revealed the shape and function
of the
nerve cells hidden in the brain’s gray matter — how when his
work was finally recognized in 1889 after a dozen years of obscurity, he
was quickly
acclaimed and subsequently awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize. Cajal and others
set the conceptual stage for the magnificent neuroscience of the 20th century.”
Nerve Endings is dedicated in part to Rapport’s mentor at Lawrence, Margaret
Shea Gilbert, who, he writes, “was one of the first women Ph.D.s in
biology, was a wonderful teacher, and deeply influenced my career in neurosurgery
(and
writing).”
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