Medicine

This volume, one of the Cambridge Illustrated History series, focuses on the development of mainstream western medicine as practised in Europe and North America. This restriction, which is acknowledged in the introduction, allows the authors to concentrate on a clearly‐defined area of knowledge, and to explain how we got to where we are in medicine. The authors have concentrated on ten specific areas which raise important questions for medical science and practice as it is at the end of the twentieth century.

The first chapter covers the history of disease, the origin of human diseases, plagues, diseases spread by colonial...