How Russ Hobbie Came to Write Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology

In the preface of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie writes

Between 1971 and 1973 I audited all the courses medical students take in their first 2 years at the University of Minnesota.

I was amazed at the amount of physics I found in these courses and how little of it is discussed in the general physics course. I found a great discrepancy between the physics in some papers in the biological research literature and what I knew to be the level of understanding of most biology majors or premed students who have taken a year of physics. It was clear that an intermediate level physics course would help these students. It would provide the physics they need and would relate it directly to the biological problems where it is useful.

This book is the result of my having taught such a course since 1973…

Want to hear more about how Russ came to write IPMB? You can! Russ was interviewed for the University of Minnesota Oral History Project. Below is an excerpt about the origin of the book.

Interviewed on September 29, 1994. University of Minnesota Campus

…I wrote Al Sullivan who was the assistant dean of the Medical School asking if it was possible to snoop around over there. Al asked me to have lunch with him one day—it was in October—and said, “What you really ought to do is to attend Medical School.” I said, “I can’t. I’m director of undergraduate studies in Physics. I’m teaching a full load, which is a course each quarter. There’s just no time to do that.” He said, “You could just audit things and skip the labs.” So, for two years, I did that….

I sat through the remainder of the year in embryology, and biochemistry, and anatomy, and pathology, and physiology, and then, in the second year, the organ systems, the neuro psych, the cardiovascular, the pulmonary, the renal, the dermatology, the bones, the GI [gastrointestinal] ….

I really got a fairly good knowledge there and found that there was just too much physics ever to fit it into the pre-med physics course. I also found that there was a tremendous gap between what we teach the pre-meds, who will take one year of physics and that’s it, and what you found in the physiology and biophysics research literature. I convinced the Physics Department that I ought to try teaching a course to try to fill that gap, a 5000 level course that has a year of general physics and a year of calculus as a prereq[uisite] that would appeal to the physiologists and so on. Probably around 1972 or 1973, I started teaching that course, developing it as I went. That turned into a book [Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology] that was published by Wiley in 1978 with a second edition about 1988. I’m trying, without much success, to do a third edition right now….

…after I started teaching the course, I can remember Professor Jack Johnson from Physiology wanted to come and sit it in; and I was quite nervous about this because I was afraid I might get some of the physiology wrong. He reminded me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d been sitting through his course and turnabout really was fair play…

I think that, as I look back at my own career, the thing that I think that was most important, that has certainly given me the greatest intellectual satisfaction is the book.

If you can’t get enough of Russ, watch him in this video about his computer program MacDose.