The doctor will see you now
Muscles to organs, nervous system to blood circulation, the human body is puzzlingly complex. How to look after it when something goes wrong has been a lesson lasting thousands of years, and there’s still so much we don’t understand. To unravel the story of medicine – with its roots in prehistoric times, boasting some of the greatest minds of antiquity and witnessing an explosion of advances in the last 200 years – is a formidable challenge. From the first experiments with trepanning to the sophisticated operations and pharmaceutical drugs we benefit from today, it spans civilisations around the world over several millennia, and across countless fields of medicine and physiology.