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Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome
An exploration of medical discoveries-from the ancient Greeks to the present
""Always help, or at least do no harm."" Following this simple yet revolutionary idea, Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine over two millennia ago. From the Hippocratic Oath to the human genome, from Pasteur's germ theory to the worldwide eradication of smallpox, Medical Firsts brings to life 2,500 years of medical advances and discoveries. Organized chronologically, the book describes each milestone in a vivid capsule history, making it a fascinating and wonderfully readable resource for anyone interested in medicine's past progress and future promise.
Robert E. Adler, PhD (Santa Rosa, CA) has worked as a psychologist and science journalist. He writes about a wide variety of scientific and medical topics for New Scientist, Nature, and other publications and is the author of Science Firsts (0-471-40174-9).
""Always help, or at least do no harm."" Following this simple yet revolutionary idea, Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine over two millennia ago. From the Hippocratic Oath to the human genome, from Pasteur's germ theory to the worldwide eradication of smallpox, Medical Firsts brings to life 2,500 years of medical advances and discoveries. Organized chronologically, the book describes each milestone in a vivid capsule history, making it a fascinating and wonderfully readable resource for anyone interested in medicine's past progress and future promise.
Robert E. Adler, PhD (Santa Rosa, CA) has worked as a psychologist and science journalist. He writes about a wide variety of scientific and medical topics for New Scientist, Nature, and other publications and is the author of Science Firsts (0-471-40174-9).
240 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 9, 2024
Reread of what was required reading for my degree a few years ago. Still interesting and insightful although, because of the rapid pace of scientific research, a little out of date in places now.
June 14, 2021
A relatively short understandable overview of medical history whose lessons will continue to be even more necessary amongst accelerating medical technology. One of the foremost themes is how extremely is to detect and correct a false idea or theory, like Galen's theory of humors, once it has won public acceptance. That theory, which was glaringly false to anyone who took the time to actually examine human anatomy, was assumed to be true for over a thousand years because of social stigma and cultural and social norms.
Another important lesson that we should never forget is to check important conclusions with data and actual experiments rather than accepting assumptions or social pressure. Once something has been clearly demonstrated, it takes a lot of internal strength and courage to stick with what has been learned and not compromise truth for the sake of people pleasing. If the stories of Semelweiss, Visalius and Peracelsus teach us anything, it is that it is possible for the majority to be wrong and simply because an idea has authority or is widely accepted does not mean it is correct.
That being said, William Harvey also showed that it is possible to disagree and recognize that things are be wrong in a lot of ways and still be respectful and civil and get along well with society. It is possible to have radically divergent ideas and still get along on an individual basis and not let larger ideas greatly affect your personal life or sanity.
Another comment I would make on the book is that it may seem easy to simply discard organized religion after looking at what was done in Europe by the Catholic church during the inquisitions and how hostile it was towards scientific advances in dissection, anesthesia, contraception and others, but doing so is equally close minded. I think the author, for the sake of conflict, tends to suggest that religion is always hostile towards medical progress. If history is any teacher, we should learn that the far reaching implications of both medical breakthroughs and moral truths are beyond our understanding and therefore should be allowed to be freely expressed rather than allowing either to descend into a controlling contest of power over the other. The author may have been slightly biased using religion as the enemy, but overall he gives a quite excellent telling of some of the most beneficial advances to humanity and the human stories that surrounded them.
Adler opens the book with a brief overview of prehistory and then predictably emphasizes the a man who will be forever associated with Western medicine. Although some of Hippocrates' ideas weren't completely accurate, he left a tradition and touched on some golden truths that continue to be relevant today. According to the book, his major contributions were specifically to bring medicine out of the realm of gods and superstition into observable, natural phenomena. He practiced less invasive treatment favoring the least sensational and methods of diet a exercise before anything radical to a patient. His thinking formed the oath that physicians take and includes that they should refrain from having relations with patients or relatives of patients and that health information learned about patients should be kept confidential. His insistence on medical ethics "continues to echo in many current controversies." Hippocrates taught scrupulous honesty and to help or at least do no harm and that the three realistic goals of medicine were to alleviate patient suffering, reduce severity of illness and refrain from treating the untreateable. He said" Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experience misleading." and he "never fled back to the comforting mysteries of religion but stuck to scrupulous observation, keen analysis." This is the ideal medicine still strives for but as long as practiced by humans seems always to be tripped up by our frailties and short-comings.
Adler then goes on to name some of the prominent physicians like Herophilus and Eristratus whose work surged forward along with the progress of civilization in ancient Alexandria. For a bright but brief high point they were able to practice dissection and dispel some mistakes perpetuated in anatomical understanding. Unfortunately their followers,"Rather than devoting themselves to the difficult, unpopular and sometimes dangerous practice of dissection and hands on studies, fell into theoretical disputes." Some Romans like Marcus Varro also had a vague idea of germs but those ideas died along with the fall of the Roman empire. With the small exception of Soranus, medical understanding "largely disappeared in the darkness and superstition that settled over Europe" during the middle ages. "Medical treatment of women, along with medicine in general became a host of charms, gruesome concoctions, blood letting, and purging....Sadly medical pioneers had to reinvent much of what had been known more than a millennium before."
One of the unknowing contributors to this downfall was the towering Greek figure Galen whose brilliance, experimentation and large volume of written works essentially intimidated physicians out of any original medical practice for about the next 1500 years. Galen looked for mathematical precision in the face of medical uncertainty and established himself as an authority with a few tricks that impressed the leaders of Rome gaining him money, prestige and 20+ scribes. Since dissecting humans was forbidden at the time, many of Galen's experiments were performed on apes and other animals. Combining his limited experimental research with the Greek's love for pure thinking he developed the theory of humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile which could explain just about any medical condition. "Tragically, it was not Galen's passionate advocacy of anatomical study and physiological experimentation that endured, but the theory he had proclaimed. "It was not until the Renaissance anatomists Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey showed that Galenic assumptions were wrong that began the long, slow and arduous process of rebuilding medicine on a scientific foundation."
One of the forerunners and rogue scientific prophets who first contributed to the downfall of Galen's unquestioned theories Paracelsus. Paracelsus was a bombastic, independent thinker who like the protestant reformers unabashedly stood against the status quo of the time questioning both their social hierarchy and theories. He lectured in German rather than Latin questioning what actually made the charms and treatments being administered effective and advocated applying alchemy, the use of solvents, evaporation, precipitation and distillation be used to make medicine instead of gold. Probably partially because of his outrageous personality he was not widely accepted and it took centuries until any of his ideas really took hold.
The next major blemish on Galen's monolithic, untouchable legacy came from Andreas Visalius who from a young age was skilled at dissection. He came from a family of doctors and became a professor quickly where broke with tradition by doing dissections himself. While dissecting he encountered a number of discrepancies between what Galen's texts and what was actually in front of him. Vesalius took a stand and worked for years on a definitive anatomy book De humani Corporis Humanis (the human body) which, like giving a lay person access to the Bible, gave open access to an understanding of the human body to all. In the years that followed, opposition flared up mainly from Vesalius's own former professor and quite sadly Vesalius caved in and burned his anatomical studies and unpublished commentary. He married, became a practicing physician and never spoke of his theories or research again. Although he gained prominence he seemed to have regretted his decision to give up research in exchange for respectability. "There may be no more fitting memorial for Visalius than his own in Fabrica "genius lives on, all else is mortal."
Before Europe could emerge from the darkness of middle ages, there was a final chapter of revolting ignorance that bogged down any other medical advances. As Protestantism began to weaken the Catholic church, the church bore down even harder by publishing Malleus Maleficarum blaming evil on "witches" who were mostly poor women. As public outrage was stirred against these helpless women, Johann Weyer was a physician who only saw vulnerable, mentally ill victims and wrote De Praestigiis in response to the church's publication. Weyer was eventually silenced and witch burning peaked in the 1600's a century after Weyer. "As the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, and Cambodian killing fields (and many others) show society has not freed itself from the potential to descend into madness, especially when fanatical ideologies take control of the state...Our best individual antidote may be Weyers admonition 'love your fellow beings, destoy errors and fight for truth without cruelty. Know with what pain truth is obtained and with what great difficulties one guards ones self against errors."
Out of this heavily authoritative atmosphere William Harvey later emerged and stuck another important blow against Galen's theory of humors. Harvey in contrast to Paracelsus and Visalius did so without making the least disruption in the social order. He calmly calculated that the heart circulated blood and that blood did not originate in the liver as Galen had taught. Harvey valued patient, insightful observation and ruthlessly dissected every idea under the scalpel of experiment...and staunchly refused to speculate about grandiose questions showing it was infinitely more productive to ask how than why."
One other major lesson in the history of medicine came from later innovations in the US. Along with purified medicine, came the application of Nitrous oxide and ether as anesthesia first used to treat tooth extractions. After a halting attempt by Horace Wells to get its acceptance known, it took two major personalities William Morton, Charles Jackson to finally bring anesthesia closer to widespread recognition but again the greatness of this breakthrough proved to be too much even for these strong personalities. Jackson, Morton and Wells fought bitterly over who got credit for it and it eventually broke them, essentially driving them mad. Another cautionary tale came with the advance of chemistry applied to medicine by Ignaz Semmelweis who recognizing the differences in the death rates at different delivery wards of hospitals, eventually figured out that he and his fellow doctors were the cause of the death by spreading contamination between women and cadavers. He immediately started requiring doctors to clean their hands but outside of his own hospital faced resistance because it required doctors to recognize "they had caused the agonizing death of many young mothers." Rather than accept this ugly truth, doctors attacked Semmelveis who retreated to his native Hungary. The weight of the truth may have been partially what drove him to insanity and he died in some ways a martyr for the the cause of scientific truth.
Adler goes on to give a brief recounting of John Snow and the emerging practice of epidemiology, Pasteur and Germ Theory. He tells of Freud and the unconscious mind. More modern tales like Ivanovsky and the discovery of viruses and Margaret Sanger and the contraceptive pill. Then Organ transplants, In Vitro Fertilization, Eradication of Small-Pox, Kuru and Prions, the Immune System, and sequencing the human genome. These firsts while incalculably valuable become much more the the product of large groups and do not have the personal details of the story of a single genius. He also briefly goes through the story of X-Rays. In contrast to Semelweiss and the discoverers of Anesthesia, describes how Roentgen discovered X-rays. Unlike earlier pioneers, there is very little resistance to his discovery and people even used them for entertainment until radiation sickness and the darker side of X-Rays were discovered. Unlike the pioneers of anesthesia, Roentgen in a more modest manner and more reminiscent of current scientists, refusing to give a public speech for his Nobel Prize and donating his prize money to furthering research. He never sought recognition for his findings and was probably better off for it when looking at the fate of those that did.
In the last chapter Adler talks about the future of medicine and along with him we all watch anxiously as human understanding and scientific progress surge forward benefitting medicine along the way. We may in fact some day be able to reverse aging and but when we do I do not think we will have left aside the moral roots remind us why they are given.
Another important lesson that we should never forget is to check important conclusions with data and actual experiments rather than accepting assumptions or social pressure. Once something has been clearly demonstrated, it takes a lot of internal strength and courage to stick with what has been learned and not compromise truth for the sake of people pleasing. If the stories of Semelweiss, Visalius and Peracelsus teach us anything, it is that it is possible for the majority to be wrong and simply because an idea has authority or is widely accepted does not mean it is correct.
That being said, William Harvey also showed that it is possible to disagree and recognize that things are be wrong in a lot of ways and still be respectful and civil and get along well with society. It is possible to have radically divergent ideas and still get along on an individual basis and not let larger ideas greatly affect your personal life or sanity.
Another comment I would make on the book is that it may seem easy to simply discard organized religion after looking at what was done in Europe by the Catholic church during the inquisitions and how hostile it was towards scientific advances in dissection, anesthesia, contraception and others, but doing so is equally close minded. I think the author, for the sake of conflict, tends to suggest that religion is always hostile towards medical progress. If history is any teacher, we should learn that the far reaching implications of both medical breakthroughs and moral truths are beyond our understanding and therefore should be allowed to be freely expressed rather than allowing either to descend into a controlling contest of power over the other. The author may have been slightly biased using religion as the enemy, but overall he gives a quite excellent telling of some of the most beneficial advances to humanity and the human stories that surrounded them.
Adler opens the book with a brief overview of prehistory and then predictably emphasizes the a man who will be forever associated with Western medicine. Although some of Hippocrates' ideas weren't completely accurate, he left a tradition and touched on some golden truths that continue to be relevant today. According to the book, his major contributions were specifically to bring medicine out of the realm of gods and superstition into observable, natural phenomena. He practiced less invasive treatment favoring the least sensational and methods of diet a exercise before anything radical to a patient. His thinking formed the oath that physicians take and includes that they should refrain from having relations with patients or relatives of patients and that health information learned about patients should be kept confidential. His insistence on medical ethics "continues to echo in many current controversies." Hippocrates taught scrupulous honesty and to help or at least do no harm and that the three realistic goals of medicine were to alleviate patient suffering, reduce severity of illness and refrain from treating the untreateable. He said" Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experience misleading." and he "never fled back to the comforting mysteries of religion but stuck to scrupulous observation, keen analysis." This is the ideal medicine still strives for but as long as practiced by humans seems always to be tripped up by our frailties and short-comings.
Adler then goes on to name some of the prominent physicians like Herophilus and Eristratus whose work surged forward along with the progress of civilization in ancient Alexandria. For a bright but brief high point they were able to practice dissection and dispel some mistakes perpetuated in anatomical understanding. Unfortunately their followers,"Rather than devoting themselves to the difficult, unpopular and sometimes dangerous practice of dissection and hands on studies, fell into theoretical disputes." Some Romans like Marcus Varro also had a vague idea of germs but those ideas died along with the fall of the Roman empire. With the small exception of Soranus, medical understanding "largely disappeared in the darkness and superstition that settled over Europe" during the middle ages. "Medical treatment of women, along with medicine in general became a host of charms, gruesome concoctions, blood letting, and purging....Sadly medical pioneers had to reinvent much of what had been known more than a millennium before."
One of the unknowing contributors to this downfall was the towering Greek figure Galen whose brilliance, experimentation and large volume of written works essentially intimidated physicians out of any original medical practice for about the next 1500 years. Galen looked for mathematical precision in the face of medical uncertainty and established himself as an authority with a few tricks that impressed the leaders of Rome gaining him money, prestige and 20+ scribes. Since dissecting humans was forbidden at the time, many of Galen's experiments were performed on apes and other animals. Combining his limited experimental research with the Greek's love for pure thinking he developed the theory of humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile which could explain just about any medical condition. "Tragically, it was not Galen's passionate advocacy of anatomical study and physiological experimentation that endured, but the theory he had proclaimed. "It was not until the Renaissance anatomists Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey showed that Galenic assumptions were wrong that began the long, slow and arduous process of rebuilding medicine on a scientific foundation."
One of the forerunners and rogue scientific prophets who first contributed to the downfall of Galen's unquestioned theories Paracelsus. Paracelsus was a bombastic, independent thinker who like the protestant reformers unabashedly stood against the status quo of the time questioning both their social hierarchy and theories. He lectured in German rather than Latin questioning what actually made the charms and treatments being administered effective and advocated applying alchemy, the use of solvents, evaporation, precipitation and distillation be used to make medicine instead of gold. Probably partially because of his outrageous personality he was not widely accepted and it took centuries until any of his ideas really took hold.
The next major blemish on Galen's monolithic, untouchable legacy came from Andreas Visalius who from a young age was skilled at dissection. He came from a family of doctors and became a professor quickly where broke with tradition by doing dissections himself. While dissecting he encountered a number of discrepancies between what Galen's texts and what was actually in front of him. Vesalius took a stand and worked for years on a definitive anatomy book De humani Corporis Humanis (the human body) which, like giving a lay person access to the Bible, gave open access to an understanding of the human body to all. In the years that followed, opposition flared up mainly from Vesalius's own former professor and quite sadly Vesalius caved in and burned his anatomical studies and unpublished commentary. He married, became a practicing physician and never spoke of his theories or research again. Although he gained prominence he seemed to have regretted his decision to give up research in exchange for respectability. "There may be no more fitting memorial for Visalius than his own in Fabrica "genius lives on, all else is mortal."
Before Europe could emerge from the darkness of middle ages, there was a final chapter of revolting ignorance that bogged down any other medical advances. As Protestantism began to weaken the Catholic church, the church bore down even harder by publishing Malleus Maleficarum blaming evil on "witches" who were mostly poor women. As public outrage was stirred against these helpless women, Johann Weyer was a physician who only saw vulnerable, mentally ill victims and wrote De Praestigiis in response to the church's publication. Weyer was eventually silenced and witch burning peaked in the 1600's a century after Weyer. "As the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, and Cambodian killing fields (and many others) show society has not freed itself from the potential to descend into madness, especially when fanatical ideologies take control of the state...Our best individual antidote may be Weyers admonition 'love your fellow beings, destoy errors and fight for truth without cruelty. Know with what pain truth is obtained and with what great difficulties one guards ones self against errors."
Out of this heavily authoritative atmosphere William Harvey later emerged and stuck another important blow against Galen's theory of humors. Harvey in contrast to Paracelsus and Visalius did so without making the least disruption in the social order. He calmly calculated that the heart circulated blood and that blood did not originate in the liver as Galen had taught. Harvey valued patient, insightful observation and ruthlessly dissected every idea under the scalpel of experiment...and staunchly refused to speculate about grandiose questions showing it was infinitely more productive to ask how than why."
One other major lesson in the history of medicine came from later innovations in the US. Along with purified medicine, came the application of Nitrous oxide and ether as anesthesia first used to treat tooth extractions. After a halting attempt by Horace Wells to get its acceptance known, it took two major personalities William Morton, Charles Jackson to finally bring anesthesia closer to widespread recognition but again the greatness of this breakthrough proved to be too much even for these strong personalities. Jackson, Morton and Wells fought bitterly over who got credit for it and it eventually broke them, essentially driving them mad. Another cautionary tale came with the advance of chemistry applied to medicine by Ignaz Semmelweis who recognizing the differences in the death rates at different delivery wards of hospitals, eventually figured out that he and his fellow doctors were the cause of the death by spreading contamination between women and cadavers. He immediately started requiring doctors to clean their hands but outside of his own hospital faced resistance because it required doctors to recognize "they had caused the agonizing death of many young mothers." Rather than accept this ugly truth, doctors attacked Semmelveis who retreated to his native Hungary. The weight of the truth may have been partially what drove him to insanity and he died in some ways a martyr for the the cause of scientific truth.
Adler goes on to give a brief recounting of John Snow and the emerging practice of epidemiology, Pasteur and Germ Theory. He tells of Freud and the unconscious mind. More modern tales like Ivanovsky and the discovery of viruses and Margaret Sanger and the contraceptive pill. Then Organ transplants, In Vitro Fertilization, Eradication of Small-Pox, Kuru and Prions, the Immune System, and sequencing the human genome. These firsts while incalculably valuable become much more the the product of large groups and do not have the personal details of the story of a single genius. He also briefly goes through the story of X-Rays. In contrast to Semelweiss and the discoverers of Anesthesia, describes how Roentgen discovered X-rays. Unlike earlier pioneers, there is very little resistance to his discovery and people even used them for entertainment until radiation sickness and the darker side of X-Rays were discovered. Unlike the pioneers of anesthesia, Roentgen in a more modest manner and more reminiscent of current scientists, refusing to give a public speech for his Nobel Prize and donating his prize money to furthering research. He never sought recognition for his findings and was probably better off for it when looking at the fate of those that did.
In the last chapter Adler talks about the future of medicine and along with him we all watch anxiously as human understanding and scientific progress surge forward benefitting medicine along the way. We may in fact some day be able to reverse aging and but when we do I do not think we will have left aside the moral roots remind us why they are given.
June 28, 2025
Well-written and researched, and overall a good summary of the history of medicine. However his religion of the Enlightenment ideal of science and progress makes it a very annoying read and once we hit the sixteenth century it eventually turns into a hagiographical martyrology of "rebellious scientific geniuses". Pretty funny how often he takes a moral high ground against the prophets who warned of the evils of dictatorships of relativism in the name of scientific progress, but he immediately falls into hero-worship and great man theory when talking about anyone who made a discovery.
May 2, 2019
"For the first and so far the only time in history, the human race had eradicated a disease. A remarkable combination of medical expertise, political will, and respectful interaction between cultures allowed us to wipe a perennial foe from the face of the earth. This is surely one of humankind's greatest accomplishments..."
An enjoyable journey through the history of medical advancements. This is a book anyone can pick up and learn something from.
An enjoyable journey through the history of medical advancements. This is a book anyone can pick up and learn something from.
August 26, 2024
Not only I learned quite a bit- I was able to connect to previous knowledge as well. The only change I would make is to add more subheadings in order to make reading easier. I would also like to see an update, since it has been 20 years that the book was published.
February 8, 2023
I loved walking through the lives of each person’s discovery of medicine. Pretty easy read and just interesting overall
October 30, 2023
read this book for a class and it was honestly really interesting and enjoyable. i really liked learning about the modern-ish medical advancements that were discussed!
May 3, 2016
An engaging read about the history of medicine spanning from the early Egyptians to the present. However, I was disappointed in the lack of diversity in this book. The author touched on a few women, most notably in the early Egyptians and then the birth control pill chapters, but there are so many women that changed medicine that were left out, for example, Virginia Apgar (who developed the Apgar test which we still use to evaluate newborns), Patricia Bath (a woman of color who invented a machine that removes cataracts), or Elizabeth Blackwell (the first ever female awarded a medical degree), and the list goes on. Reading biography after biography of old, white men got repetitive after a very short while. That being said, I may or may not have gotten teary eyed when I was reading the chapter on the human genome project and the author expounded upon his idea that our DNA links us to everything and everyone around us. We are, quite literally, made up of the same things that we take beauty in everyday (the sun, the stars, nature, etc.). Reflecting upon that sentiment, I look at the world a bit differently now.
September 9, 2012
I loved this book because it combined two of my favorite things: medicine and history. This book takes the reader through a down and dirty brief synopsis of the history of medicine with each chapter comprising one major discovery or development. Some of the discoveries were profound while others were very simple.
Some discoveries have become so ingrained into our day to day lives that they are common sense. I would recommend this book to everyone because even those that don't love medicine and history can learn lots from the stories contained within, stories of deceit, good & evil, and so much more. Medicine is fascinating and the end of the book turned the reader's mind to the future and the incredible things that are about to unfold.
Some discoveries have become so ingrained into our day to day lives that they are common sense. I would recommend this book to everyone because even those that don't love medicine and history can learn lots from the stories contained within, stories of deceit, good & evil, and so much more. Medicine is fascinating and the end of the book turned the reader's mind to the future and the incredible things that are about to unfold.
August 31, 2021
Wonderfully combines medicine and history, resulting in a book that's full of 'nice to know' knowledge. Even the last two chapters, which are more science heavy than the rest of the book are written in an interesting manner. I recommend this to anyone wanting to see how our medicine, and so our way of life, has changed in over 2500 years of medical/human history. And in under 300 pages it's not too much of a chore either!
April 19, 2014
short stories about medical advantages
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews