Description
Discover the fascinating history of medicine, from its primitive beginnings to the life-saving technologies of today. Now in paperback!
In The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects, Dr Carol Cooper takes readers on an engaging, humorous, and sometimes gruesome journey through the 12 objects that have come to define medicine through the ages.
Over the years, with increasingly more knowledge about health and disease, the ways in which doctors engage with sickness have evolved, and so have the tools used to treat patients.
My Review
Thanks to the publisher, Aurum, for sending me a copy of this book, and to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours, for arranging this blog tour.
The author takes us through the history of medicine using twelve objects she has chosen as representative. I’ve read the 2026 edition of this book. I don’t know what the differences are between the 2024 edition and this one.
The ‘twelve objects’ are nominal; Dr Cooper takes them as her starting point in each chapter and follows the history of each to from the earliest beginnings to the current state, for example, with the x-ray machine, she does a brief explanation of the discovery of x-rays, the development of x-rays in medicine and then goes on to discuss other imaging technology like MRI machines and PET scans.
This was a really interesting read. I’m fascinated by the complexity of the body and the way each invention is the work of multiple minds and actors, the interconnection between science, industry and medicine, and this book helps to put these things in context. Also made me wish I’d pursued physics and chemistry instead of biology and chemistry.
Highly recommended for the general reader, easy to read and very informative.
About the Author
Carol Cooper is a doctor, journalist, and author. She has taught students at Imperial College Medical School for almost twenty years, for which she received the Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Award in 2022. She was elected President of the Guild of Health Writers in 2014, and delivered the prestigious Tom Olsen Lecture in 2022 ‘Has Covid Fractured the Way We Live?’. She is a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, her alma mater.
Carol has authored and edited a string of non-fiction books. These include numerous guides on child health and parenting, as well as an award-winning book on general practice. More recently, she has turned to writing novels with a medical strand.
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