How medicine became effective, mostly quite recently.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Aequanimitas: With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine
William Osler · 1904
Collects addresses urging 'equanimity' — calm, unshaken judgement — as the essential professional temperament for physicians, alongside Osler's own…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Sacred Disease
Hippocrates · 400 BCE
Argues that epilepsy has a natural cause in the brain like any other disease, not a divine one, against the common belief of the author's own time.
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On a New Method of Treating Compound Fracture, Abscess, etc., with Observations on the Conditions of Suppuration
Joseph Lister · 1867
Presents a longer series of case reports applying carbolic acid dressings to open fractures and abscesses, arguing in detail that excluding…
+3 more at this level
12 of 13 works
William Osler
Collects addresses urging 'equanimity' — calm, unshaken judgement — as the essential professional temperament for physicians, alongside Osler's own more contentious argument that a doctor's most productive years end by sixty.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Julie M. Fenster
Narrates the rival claims to the discovery of surgical anaesthesia — a dentist, a physician and a chemist all claiming credit — as a story less about a flash of genius than about who controlled the account afterward.
John M. Barry
Narrates the 1918 influenza pandemic as a story of American science's overconfidence colliding with an unprecedented virus, and of the political suppression of warnings that let the disease spread unchecked.
Hippocrates
Argues that epilepsy has a natural cause in the brain like any other disease, not a divine one, against the common belief of the author's own time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Austin Bradford Hill
Sets out the case for allocating patients to treatment by chance rather than by doctor's preference, arguing that only randomisation protects a trial's comparison from prejudice, wishful thinking and unconscious bias.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William H. McNeill
Argues that infectious disease has been as decisive a force in shaping human history — from the fall of Rome to the conquest of the Americas — as war, trade or ideology, explaining events historians usually attribute to human agency alone.
Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication
Certifies, on the basis of two years without a single reported case anywhere, that smallpox has been eradicated worldwide, closing the campaign Fenner's history later narrates in full.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Fenner et al.
Gives the official WHO history of the decade-long campaign that eradicated smallpox in 1980, arguing that targeted surveillance and containment, not mass vaccination alone, was decisive once outbreaks became localised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Snowden (YaleCourses)
Argues that epidemics are shaped by social structure as much as by pathogens, and that each major disease reorganised the institutions of the society it struck.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joseph Lister
Presents a longer series of case reports applying carbolic acid dressings to open fractures and abscesses, arguing in detail that excluding decomposing organic matter from wounds — not merely cleanliness — is what prevents the suppuration that had made compound fractures so often fatal.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Louis Pasteur
Presents experimental evidence to the French Academy that specific germs, not spontaneous generation, cause fermentation and infectious disease, and argues surgeons should sterilise their instruments accordingly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexander Fleming
Reports that a mould contaminating a bacterial culture plate secretes a substance that dissolves nearby staphylococcus colonies, the observation that led to penicillin though Fleming did not yet purify or test it as a drug.
link checked 17 Sept 2026