The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

James Le Fanu

How did medicine go from having hardly any effective treatments to a stream of cures, and why did the age of optimism end?

At a glance

You will see how a few advances, such as heart transplants and childhood cancer treatment, changed what doctors could do
You will learn that for a long time doctors could diagnose well but treat very little
You will understand how much of what medicine can do today arrived in one burst of discovery after the Second World War