Excellent!
Very updated and complete, including chapters regarding Pre-historic medicine and its research, medicine in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome, Islamic medicine and medicine in Native american civilizations. Despite it stills being a pretty eurocentric and north american based history book as usual, it shows some advance towards focusing on a real global history of medicine.
The repetitions and interconections between different parts of the history which are sometimes made by the author, despite always trying to keep the chronological line, seems to have being more beneficial than troublesome for the overall learning and understanding.
It's also true that some chapters are too long while others could be better explored. For example, the evangelical enthusiasts on the american health reform are really overemphasized, letting me the impression i've learned more about people such as Ellen Withe or Harvey Kellogg than about Hippocrates on this book. At the same time, there's not even a mention to geniuses such as Nikolay Pirogov or nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov, for example. But again, it just shows the ubiquous need of having a lesser tendecious history telling.
Furthermore, since we as human beings are always inescapably influenced by our own culture, this partiality is a forgivable mistake that tends to diminish with the increasing and unprecedent cultural interchange of our era.
Another interesting point about this book is the focusing on female physicians and discussion of gender equality, in the attempt to correct alleged historical mistakes that erased women from medical history. A kind of feminist approach, which has the advantage of bringing to light brilliant female figures that otherwise would be unknown, but the disadvantage of sacrificing focus on more historically influential characters because of their gender. Unfortunately, the sacrife seems to have been greater than the gain, and too many pages are used for gender equality instead of history of medicine.
Nevertheless, the amount of knowledge i got from this book is huge and reading it was totally worthwhile.
It's also always hard to find a so thorough book on this area, being the most complete i've ever read. It even includes history of homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, hidropathy, orthomolecular therapy and many others so called alternative medicines.
In the end, i can just recommend it! Amazing book for anyone interested in medical history.