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Milestones in Western Medicine: Whose shoulders am I standing on? 5,000 BC to 1899 AD
Milestones in Western Medicine: Whose shoulders am I standing on? 5,000 BC to 1899 AD
Stephen Schey
£11.99
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From trepanned skulls and Stone Age splints to robotic surgery and fluoridated water, this book traces how humans have tried to understand, repair, and protect the body across millennia. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, papyri, chronicles and modern science, it follows medicine’s long journey from magic and myth to experiment and evidence.Prehistoric healers, Egyptian priest-physicians, Greek philosophers, Roman army surgeons, barber-surgeons, monks, astrologer-doctors and today’s specialists all appear here, not as isolated curiosities but as stages in a continuous story. We meet Hippocrates and Galen, Imhotep and Asklepios, battlefield surgeons and dental pioneers, saints, kings and quacks – and the patients whose suffering drove innovation.For readers curious about how we got from charms and leeches to ICUs and imaging suites, this is a vivid, humane history of medicine – and a reminder that today’s “modern” practices stand on very ancient bones.
ISBN : 978-1-83543-904-3
Scheduled: 08/10/2026
Pages : 296
Size : 205x140mm Portrait
Imprint : Olympia Publishers
Stephen Schey
Stephen Schey trained in medicine at St George’s Hospital in London. He travelled overland from London to Australia in 1979, travelling through Iran during the downfall of the Shah and leaving Afghanistan weeks before the Russian invasion in December 1979. He worked in Australia for three years before returning to the UK and taking up a Consultant Haematologist post in 1985 at Guy’s Hospital. He was appointed Professor of Plasma Cell Disorders at King’s College, London University and retired from clinical practice in 2023. His interests include listening to music, travelling, food and wine, and he lives with his wife, Lynn, in Surrey.
