the History of Medicine: From Ancient Healers to Germ Theory and Modern Hospital

Medicine has not always been a science. For most of its history it was a craft: a body of inherited doctrine, a set of practical skills, and an authority that rested on the standing of the practitioner rather than on anything a patient could check. This book follows the long argument in which that changed.It opens with the healers of antiquity, the doctrine of the four humors, the hospitals and Galenic learning of the Islamic world, and the anatomy of 1543, and with the surgery that was carried out on conscious patients until the 1840s. From Edward Jenner's cowpox experiment of 1796 onward it holds to one compass, tracing how field after field acquired something that could settle an argument: the stethoscope, ether and chloroform, the mortality tables of Vienna and Scutari, the bacteriological laboratory, antiseptic and then aseptic surgery, the hospital rebuilt as an instrument of treatment, the X-ray, the blood groups, insulin, and penicillin.The account does not stop at the achievements. The same profession that produced those tools also wrote sterilization laws, ran segregated colonial health services, and conducted experiments on people who were in no position to refuse, and the closing chapter sets that half of the record beside the other.Throughout, figures are given as the sources give them, disagreements are reported as disagreements, and what is documented is kept apart from what has only been retold.