Owsei Temkin

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Owsei Temkin (National Library of Medicine)

Owsei Temkin was an influential medical historian who sought to contextualize medical practice.

Owsei Temkin (October 6, 1902 – July 18, 2002) was born in Minsk, Russia and grew up in Leipzig, Germany. he graduated from Leipzig University in 1927 and shortly thereafter he dedicated himself full-time to medical history, moving to Baltimore in 1932 to work at the newly-formed Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he would spend the next seventy years, becoming its director from 1958 to 1968. Temkin was especially interested in the history of ancient medicine and its influences on current practice, and he continued writing until the year of his death at 99. Among his best-known works are The Falling Sickness (1971) and The Double Face of Janus (1977).