Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome

"Each disease has a nature of its own, and none arises without its natural cause." With this simple, yet revolutionary idea, the Greek physician Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine over two millennia ago. Of course, prior to that, healers had achieved some remarkable things. But ancient medicine was a hit-and-miss affair rooted in pagan ritual and magic. For example, an ancient Egyptian doctor might just as likely prescribe a ritual dance as medicinal herbs for pneumonia. It was Hippocrates who took medicine out of the realm of myth and superstition and established it on a scientific footing. So powerful was his idea of relying on the direct and systematic observation of nature to reveal the causes and cures of diseases that virtually every major medical advance since then can be traced directly back to it. In Medical Firsts, science journalist and author Robert Adler recounts the fascinating story of Western medicine as told through the lives and achievements of more than thirty of its brightest lights. Combining a journalist's economy of style and a born storyteller's way with a good yarn, he takes us on a grand tour of 2,500 years of medical innovation-- from Hippocrates' grand idea to William Harvey's discovery of the workings of the human circulatory system to Pasteur's proof of the germ theory of disease to the mapping of the human genome. He provides vivid profiles of the great men and women responsible for the medical milestones he describes, while bringing the science and technology involved down to earth for general readers. Medical Firsts offers you an exciting opportunity to be an eyewitness to medical history in the making. You'll visit Rome in the first century a.d. to meet Soranus, founder of obstetrics and gynecology. You'll eavesdrop on Sigmund Freud in the Viennese consulting room where he unlocked the secrets of the subconscious mind. You'll watch as accomplished con man and the world's first anesthesiologist, William Morton, administers ether to a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, site of the first use of surgical anesthesia, in 1844. And you'll visit the research labs and hospitals around the world where exciting breakthroughs in stem cell and gene therapies are rapidly writing a bold new chapter in the story begun by Hippocrates twenty-five centuries ago.