Customer Reviews

The Timetables of Medicine : An Illustrated Chronology of the History of Medicine from Prehistory to Present Times

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A visually attractive book that will provide quick information on medical developments through history, helpful in relating what happened in the medical world at similar times but in different settings or places. Brief time-relationship is also given to non-medical events. Bibliography is extense, Internet and museum references are welcome for their usefulness to those interested in expanding their information. Latinamerican contributions to Medicine is greatly ignored by the authors.

I enjoyed getting this book for my classes. It's a visual map of medicine from the beginning of time (homo sapien's time). There was some information in there that was new to me, but most of it is stuff I already knew. It's the presentation that is great to show students when things occurred and why, especially in terms of changes in society. This book makes it clear that medical changes in preserving life and actually curing disease, was dependent upon the different sciences making progress in each individual field. Then those changes could be incorporated into medicine.

An example of this, is the development of microscopes during the Enlightenment Era, and increasing better optics made it possible for Pasteur to come up with germ theory. It wasn't until this area in physics was conquered for it to be possible for researchers to see bacteria. This is well-illustrated in this book.

I was hoping for a better bibliography. Most of the books are pretty general, and I was hoping for more specifics to follow up the information given in the timeline with books for students to read in the areas they are interested in, rather than just medical history.

Only other complaint is the typeface on the timelines is so small you practically need a magnifying glass to look at this book with. A little bit large typeface, and more pages would have been fine.

Well, off to look up some of the new stuff I found in the timetable...

Karen Sadler,
Science Education