Each of these individuals have been given an epithet of "Father/Mother of XYZ field". Simply identify the field, and use the number to index into the field.
"Father"
Field
Index
Letter
William Hewson
HAEMATOLOGY
1
H
Gregor Mendel
GENETICS
2
E
Jean-Martin Charcot
NEUROLOGY
6
L
Andreas Vesalius
ANATOMY
1
A
Thomas Lewis
CARDIOLOGY
1
C
J. Marion Sims
GYNAECOLOGY
5
E
Paracelsus
TOXICOLOGY
7
L
Thomas Starzl
TRANSPLANT
7
L
William Beaumont
GASTROENTEROLOGY
3
S
Margaret Dayhoff
BIOINFORMATICS
6
F
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
MICROBIOLOGY
4
R
Harvey Cushing
NEUROSURGERY
5
O
Edward Jenner
IMMUNOLOGY
2
M
Claude Bernard
PHYSIOLOGY
2
H
John Snow
EPIDEMIOLOGY
1
E
John Merrill
NEPHROLOGY
5
R
The clue phrase spells HELA CELLS FROM HER, referring to HENRIETTA LACKS, whose biological tissue was used (without her consent) to develop the HeLa immortalised cell-line, the oldest and one of the most widely-used human cell-lines.
Author's notes
Author: Dan
I would like to apologise for the lack of diversity in this puzzle — turns out the founders of the various medical fields in medicine are all white men (shocker!). Therefore, I would like to dedicate my author’s notes to the two women included in this puzzle — Margaret Oakley Dayhoff and Henrietta Lacks.
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff is widely recognised as the “mother of bioinformatics”, introducing computational methods for analysing data, in particular protein sequences. In fact, as a setter of medical puzzles and a puzzler myself, I have much to thank Margaret for her contribution to the world of bioinformatics (and, incidentally, to puzzling) — she developed the one-letter coding for amino acids (see 4.4. Radiotherapy for a clue that references this) in order to minimise the data file sizes for each protein sequence back in 1966 (and has proceeded to haunt every biomedicine student in subsequent decades…)
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who will forever remain immortalised in the field of biomedical research. For while she passed away from cervical cancer at the age of 31, her cervical cells (HeLa cells) isolated in 1951 remain immortalised forever, as they are the first immortalised human cell line and have contributed, and continue to contribute to, countless pieces of landmark biomedical research (e.g. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, the HPV vaccine, HIV/AIDS research, the Human Genome Project, and cancer research) to this day. I first encountered Henrietta Lacks’ story from a Radiolab podcast episode, which you can listen to here.
This puzzle is the third in this Hunt where the legendary John Snow, father of epidemiology, makes an appearance.