Note well that this is a history not only of medicine and disease, but of science as well. The emphasis is on twentieth century developments, which is as it should be since so much has happened in recent times. This is not to say that the more distant past is neglected. Kennedy starts with the pre-history and follows the quest for health through Greek and Roman times to "The Rise of Islam and Arabic Medicine" (Chapter 5) with excursions into ayurvedic medicine (from India) and the traditional Chinese practices from antiquity. He even looks at European health, or the lack thereof, during the Dark and Middle Ages before the rise of science. When he gets to the modern or nearly modern era, Kennedy organizes less by chronology and more by subject matter. Some of the later chapters are about "Cardiac Surgery," "Transplantation," "Psychiatry," etc. I particularly liked the crisp way he dealt with psychoanalytic theory and the inefficacy of psychoanalysis.

Frankly, I don't know if there is anything else quite like this available. The recognized authority on the subject of the history of medicine in English, University College London's late Roy Porter wrote both a popular account, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (2002), and a full blown treatment, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997) which Kennedy cites. I have read the former and it is to Kennedy's book as Mary Poppins is to Hamlet. There are other histories, but most are either not current or too voluminous or too restricted in content.

Dr. Kennedy shows how various ideas and methods were developed, how they stemmed from, or were in contrast to, earlier methods; and he highlights the personalities of the practitioners as he describes what they did or discovered. He also focuses on patients and their stories. His style is sharp and uncluttered. Sometimes he employs a dry, cynical wit. At other times his report takes on extra-medical aspects that lend depth and familiarity to his portraits, as when, for example, he reports on the tragic death of transplant pioneer, Dr. David Hume. (p. 388)

Here are some examples of the kind of detail that I found fascinating:

"The early Middle Ages saw little consumption of animal protein by the peasants, but legume production, which increased with the agricultural revolution, reduced the dependence on carbohydrates and led to rapid population growth again." (p. 69)

And on the following page: "Women lived shorter lives than men in the Middle Ages...This is attributed to the hazards of childbirth, but also to an iron deficient diet...[because] animal protein was not available."

"...[A]lthough opium offered some relief of pain...until the anesthesia era, speed was the sign of the good surgeon." (p. 85)

"Infectious diseases were uncommon in primitive societies because the available pool of susceptible individuals was too small and the contact with other groups was not common." (p. 87) Indeed, infectious disease is part of the price we pay for agriculture and civilization.

Quoting Freud: "I often console myself with the idea that, even though we achieve so little therapeutically, at least we understand why more cannot be achieved." (p. 401) This is doubly ironic since Freud was even deceived in what he thought he understood. A few pages later Kennedy drily remarks that psychotherapy "is useful in helping adults to deal with life stress. It has little or no role in treating psychosis. The serious mental illnesses are increasingly seen as biological disorders." (p. 424)

The only weakness of this book is that it could have used a more meticulous editor. (The proofreading is excellent.) Kennedy's writing style is fast-forward, actually suggesting to me how medical history might be written had somebody like, say, novelist James M. Cain taken his hand to it. The words just rush down the page. Kennedy has so much to say and he wants to get it all said. Sometimes one has to read a sentence twice since sometimes his tenses are a little eccentric, and parallel construction is not always strictly observed.

There are two indices, one for names, but I notice that the aforementioned Roy Porter, for example, does not appear in either of them. Probably the names in the footnotes were left out. Also the references (545 of them) are collected at the end of each chapter, which is fine, but there is no overall alphabetized bibliography. This is a pet peeve of mine since one has to chase through chapter after chapter to see if a particular work is cited.

However Kennedy more than makes up for this deficiency with what he calls a "Postscript" which is a lightly annotated bibliography organized into the categories, "Recommended Reading," "General Sources," and sources by individual chapters.

Bottom line: the best history of medicine that I have found and a delight to read.

26 of 30 found the following review helpful:

I'm the author  Aug 01, 2005
By Michael T Kennedy
I got a chuckle from a recent review by Seven Octaves. It was similar to a review in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Everyone wishes I had added a few hundred pages on their favorite subject. The book was written for medical students and nurses and pre-med students. I have been surprised at the acceptance by non-medical people. The idea was to provide what every young medical student or nurse or pre-med student should know. Salvarsan is of historic significance only. Erlich is important for his concept of the receptor that predicted antibiotics. The Bulletin reviewer would have preferred more on ancient medicine. I agree. But I would need a two volume work. Thanks for all the nice, and not so nice, comments. Even the guy who thinks my writing is terrible.

The hardcover edition is now ( December 2008) going out of print as it has been sold out. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy. A new soft cover version, with the same contents and trade paperback size, will be out in January ( 2009) and will sell for the same price.

18 of 21 found the following review helpful:

Interesting look into the history of medicine - good and bad  Feb 26, 2004
By Harold McFarland
Personally I always enjoy a historical book that actually discusses history and not some surgically altered history that only reports the things that went right. That is what you get with "A Brief History of Disease, Science & Medicine". Not only do you read about the great advances in medicine but also about the mistakes that were made along the way. Although the book was written with the first year medical student in mind it is easy enough to read and understand by those with only a passing knowledge of basic first aid. Perhaps one sentence from the Forward best describes the writing style - "...it has been written to be read, rather than studied."

Dr. Kennedy states that this book was not widely accepted by the academic presses and so was published independently. It is fairly obvious that one of the reasons this might be the case is his candid examination of the history of medicine. In an age when most practitioners of the medical profession seem to feel that they have perfect knowledge, Dr. Kennedy's book shows that they have often been wrong with tragic results. Take for instance the case of Ignaz Semmelweiss who worked in a hospital where there was a twenty-nine percent mortality rate for women giving birth. Through experimentation and deduction he came to believe that washing your hands between patients and after autopsies would cause this rate to drop. He ordered that hand washing would be done between patients and the rate of death dropped drastically. However, since he had not reason why it worked it was resisted, he eventually resigned (other historians have noted that he was forced to resign) and the doctors returned to their old habits and the old mortality rate. After all it made no sense to them that something they could not see could make any difference. Many people will immediately see the similarities between things like this and modern attitude of medical science as related to alternative therapies - if we don't yet understand how it works then it must not work. Most medical history texts are severely sanitized to keep such historical errors out. So, it is really no surprise that this book, which portrays history as it was, from many primary sources, is not the most popular one among the medical establishment.

Personally, I enjoyed the book but I am one of those who enjoys history from a viewpoint of accuracy - warts and all. Still you should be prepared to have some of your history that you learned in high school discredited. I remember learning that Louis Pasteur invented innoculations to prevent disease in the later 1800's, but the fact is that Charles Maitland and others were doing it in the 1700's. "A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine" is a recommended read for anyone interested in the history and progression of medicine.

12 of 14 found the following review helpful:

Fascinating and highly informative  Mar 05, 2004
By Kurt A. Johnson
This fascinating book is an up-to-date history of medicine and medical science. The book begins with a fascinating look at medicine and diseases from prehistoric times to the early nineteenth century, when so little of such things were truly understood. Then, the pace of the book picks up, when the speed of breakthroughs in medical understanding and technology began to simply explode. And then, the final, more modern, chapters spread out, covering everything from DNA and anesthesia to the economics of medicine.

This book was originally designed with medical students and young physicians in mind, but it is no dry textbook. Instead, this book is a fascinating read, covering a whole lot of subjects, without becoming boring. What I especially liked was that the author obviously deeply understands non-Western medicine, and he made sure to include in it in the book. This book is a great read with lots of fascinating information (for example: did you know that King Henry VIII of England probably suffered from syphilis, and that the disease probably had a major role in history?). Overall, I found this to be a fascinating and highly informative book, and I highly recommend it to you!

12 of 14 found the following review helpful:

Enormously educational yet thoroughly entertaining and fun  Feb 20, 2004
By Robert Moore
This is both an extremely ambitious and enormously entertaining history of the development of the medical treatment of human beings throughout the ages. It is ambitious in that the author attempts to survey the field from prehistory until the present day, and to do so in less than five hundred pages. The scope means that at times things of necessity have to be left out. For instance, the great story in science as a whole (and in medicine in particular) between classical antiquity and the early 17th century is the growth and eventual downfall of Aristotelianism, which provided the scientific background for nearly every branch of scientific endeavor during that time. Many of the key events of that story are briefly recounted, but many are not (e.g., allied discoveries by Galileo in astronomy that refuted Aristotelian assumptions). Still, given the limitations of space, this is an admirable treatment of the subject. To deal with every issue comprehensibly would have expanded dramatically the size of the book, which would have given the lie to the title. My one serious objection to the book is that the book does not have an overarching narrative structure. I'm not always sure what particular story is being told. Nonetheless, it is impossible to come away from the book without a far deeper appreciation for the remarkable journey medicine has undertaken over the centuries. It also makes me enormously grateful that I am alive today, and not in some previous century.

Above all, this is a fun, engaging, thoroughly entertaining book. Although the book sometimes veers towards the encyclopedic, the style at all times is anecdotal. The author loves his subject, and especially delights in the quirkier side of things. There are mountains of fascinating trivia, and as a lover of great trivia I was constantly saying to myself, "Wow, I didn't know that!" Some of the more fascinating bits of the book are when Kennedy discusses famous individuals and the way in which disease may have affected them, such as Ivan the Terrible or Henry VIII. Even in modern medical discoveries, he has an eye for the unusual.

This is also, however, a very educational book. The amount of information contained in its pages is fairly staggering. One great use for the book is to read through the sections on a particular epoch if one is engaged in historical reading. But the book is more than a collection of interesting facts. The reader gains an appreciation for the way that medical practice has developed over the centuries. For instance, Kennedy discusses how before the invention of anesthesia speed was a highly esteemed virtue in a surgeon. Surgery was performed quickly, and as a result there was less of an emphasis on working carefully and carefully suturing. But with the development of anesthesia, surgery slowed down, and surgeons took more care to operate with great care and to minimize injury to tissue. This is merely one random example out of thousands.

One of the most appealing aspects of the book is the deeply personal style of the author. Closely aligned with his love of the anecdotes and trivia is his eye for the humorous side of things. He also writes with a personal touch. In discussing some medical condition, he will mention that he had had such a case himself at such and such a point, or that someone had devised a form of pediatric surgery, and he later had as a patient the second recipient ever of that treatment. Or he will mention that his mother's uncle had a certain medical condition, or aunt was a nurse for a famous doctor.

This truly is a book suited for a variety of audiences. I have a strong interest in history, and as a result I enjoyed most the first half, in part because I had the background to understand everything there pretty easily. I struggled a bit more in the second half as medicine became more specialized, but I imagine that this half would be of greater interest to medical students or physicians. The main thing that I want to emphasize is that both the medical student and the educated nonspecialist will equally find much to enjoy in the book. Similarly, one could also employ the book merely as a reference work, or read it several chapters at a time. It is rare, however, that a book can be so educational over such a wide-ranging subject, and entertain so thoroughly at the same time.

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