A Short History of Medicine

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Charles Singer's A Short History of Medicine offers more than a chronology of cures: it is a clear, thoughtful account of how medicine became a scientific and humane discipline. Opening with ancient Greece, where rational healing emerged from older mixtures of magic, animism, and inherited wisdom, the book traces the long continuity of medical thought through Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen to the modern age. Singer argues that medicine must be understood through ideas, methods, and principles rather than through a parade of names, and he presents it as a field that studies the whole living person, not a machine. From surgery, obstetrics, sanitation, and hospital reform to microscopy, circulation, respiration, and the chemistry of life, the narrative follows the experiments and instruments that transformed healing. It then charts the rise of anesthesia, germ theory, cellular pathology, bacteriology, immunology, pharmacology, and the prevention of epidemic disease, especially smallpox, from inoculation to Jenner's vaccination. Throughout, Singer defends specialization as necessary but insists that true medical progress lies in broader scientific understanding and in medicine's enduring concern for suffering humanity.