The latest book releases for curious minds

MEDICINE: A MAGNIFICENT ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

FROM MUMMIES TO MRI SCANS

AUTHOR BRIONY HUDSON

ILLUSTRATOR NICK TAYLOR

PUBLISHER TEMPLAR PUBLISHING

PRICE £16.99 (APPROX. $18.75)

RELEASE OUT NOW

For most of us, ‘medicine’ simply means a couple of aspirin when we have a headache, a prescription for antibiotics when we have a nasty cough or something a doctor practices. This is all true, although off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals and modern GP techniques are a very small part of the expansive history of medicine. No doubt that for the sake of squeezing everything into an 80-page tome, Medicine: AMagnificent Illustrated History has left out entire categories of medical history that have some bearing on the methods used today, but it still feels pretty comprehensive anyway.

Taking us across thousands of years of experimentation, eureka moments and unscrupulous quacks, author Briony Hudson has selected some big milestones in the treatment of disease and injury: the esoteric beliefs of ancient cultures and medieval physicians who categorised human ailments into four different ‘humours’, how plagues and pandemics were dealt with in the past, the absolutely critical discovery of penicillin, our understanding of mental health, the role ‘big pharma’ plays in the development of modern medicines, women in medicine, surgical history… the list of chapters goes on, all of them dealt with in a succinct and engaging bedside manner. Nick Taylor’s striking colour-block illustrations give this book a suitably vintage-era style, and its overall design gets an appreciative nod from us at How It Works. Between the boxes of text and in healthy doses are annotated images, cutaway illustrations and even comic strips. We particularly enjoyed the Burke and Hare comic strip, a dark tale that hails from Edinburgh in the early 19th century that nevertheless has led us to the establishment of proper rules around autopsies and a fuller understanding of human anatomy.