The best books about the history of medicine

Bliss’s classic book is the definitive account of the discovery of insulin by Canadians Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.R.R. Macleod, and James Collip. I share this story in my book but Bliss delves far deeper into this incredible tale full of drama and human failings.

Bliss describes Banting as a failed surgeon who had a middle-of-the-night epiphany about how to isolate the unknown product of the pancreas’s mysterious islets of Langerhans cells. Eminent scientist Macleod gives Banting a chance and some lab space, but in the end, Banting accuses Macleod of stealing credit for this discovery that turns diabetes from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable illness.

Banting loathes Macleod so much that he almost refuses his Nobel Prize because he is so angry that Macleod will also get one!

This fantastic biography recounts one of the greatest rivalries in medical history during the race for the polio vaccine, which pitted Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin against each other.

Salk favored a killed-virus approach, which was easier but perhaps less protective and long lasting. Sabin preferred an attenuated-virus method that was more difficult to make but could be life-long and delivered orally rather than by serial injections.

Salk’s vaccine arrived first and saved thousands of lives, but Sabin still publicly criticized it, even in testimony to Congress. Sabin’s vaccine later became favored, but the debate about whose was superior persisted and continued long after each man’s death.

Carter’s superb narrative benefited from his weeks-long interviews with Salk, and interviews with other major figures in the effort to defeat polio.

The discovery of penicillin is one of humanity’s greatest stories of serendipity and Eric Lax’s retelling is excellent.

Though Alexander Fleming has received the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, in truth, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley were the ones who discovered and proved the penicillium mold’s true medical effectiveness as an antibiotic.

How this trio from Oxford made their breakthrough at the height of WWII and were robbed of the credit is a fabulous tale as spellbinding as any Hollywood movie.

Fitzharris’s book is a page-turner that takes readers into the macabre operating theaters of the Victorian era, when surgeons rarely washed their hands or cleaned their scalpels, anesthesia did not exist, and the “best” surgeons were simply those who worked the fastest.

Joseph Lister’s effort to convince the world of the merits of antisepsis is a true underdog story in which the stakes could not have been higher. 

The history of medicine is a fluid, living discipline that is changing as rapidly as contemporary science.

In this century, the advent of CRISPR/Cas-9 gene editing, discovered by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, is a game changer that has galvanized the field of gene therapy and is already producing cures that save lives today. Isaacson’s origin story of this thrilling discovery is as gripping as it is relevant to current medicine.

I particularly loved reading about Doudna’s upbringing in Hawaii as I have very fond memories of doing part of my medical training in Honolulu.