As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S.

Hans Zinsser

This remarkable book is a legacy to his generation from a great doctor, great scientist, great talker, and a complete human being. Dr. Hans Zinsser of the Harvard Medical School has set down, under the transparent fiction of a biography of R.S., the best remembered personal experiences of his life—his best stories, his best thoughts, his matured reflections on life and how it behaves, from obstetrics to education and research and war. He has written his book as he talks to his students and to his friends. This is a man of many friends, and of an insatiable zest for experience. He went through the amusing, pathetic, tragic experiences of an ambulance doctor to the wider field of research in bacteriology. His success there carried him afield as an expert, to typhus camps in Serbia, to China, to Persia, to Mexico in search of rats, to Japan. He carried with him, in addition to his research equipment, one of those liberal, observant minds, well-stocked with education, humorous, reflective, optimistic, which takes as much as it gives, and stores it away to ripen. This book is not only his autobiography, it is also the book of a modern Boswell reporting his times and ours.