After a morning soccer game for my daughter, I decided to take advantage of the Columbus Day holiday on campus by doing a little cleaning of my office. I came across two old copies of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology dating to 1926 (vol. 9, no. 4) and 1927 (vol. 10, no. 1), with many of the pages still uncut. I do not remember exactly how I came upon these two issues, but it is somewhat fascinating to go back and look at the contents, much of which is focused on questions of race and identifying the distribution of anthropological characters with respect to race. The latter issue begins with a commentary from AJPA founder, Aleš Hrdlička, on the importance of anthropology in medical instruction:
The bearing of anthropological knowledge on different branches of Medicine is so intimate and important that a first-class medical education today without the anthropological aspect of things must necessarily be incomplete and constitute a serious handicap to the graduate, which he may never be able to overcome. This fact has long been recognized in Anatomy, with the result that every prominent anatomist is also more or less an anthropologist. It is strongly appreciated in Europe, and there are already a number of outstanding medical schools in this country, such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Rus, and those of the University of Virginia, Western Reserve at Cleveland, Washington University at St. Louis, and Leland Stanford, where some anthropological instruction at least is given to the medical student, which is supplemented in most of these establishments by opportunities for original anthropological observations. In view of the value of such instruction and research, both practical and scientific, it is safe to predict that in the not far distant future no medical college of high standing will feel justified to go on without adding a substantial course of anthropological instruction to its curriculum. Some would do so at once, were enough anthropologists available. (emphasis added)
To be fair, Hrdlička goes on in the essay to claim a large academic terrain for Anthropology, spanning all of human biology, developmental biology and human genetics, most of which are ubiquitous parts of med school curricula. But one could probably write a similar essay today, replacing Hrdlička’s emphasis on anatomy with both evolutionary and biocultural approaches in anthropology. At least Hrdlička was right about Piltdown…
