A History of the Medicines We Take: From Ancient Times to Present Day
Medicines and herbal remedies often figure in historical novels, but usually the description is tantalisingly vague, collections of unspecified herbs that happen to be conveniently available. This book, first of all, takes the reader right through the history of medicines from prehistory to the present day, incidentally telling me much that I did not know about modern medicines, and then goes on to give a history of ‘dosage forms’, describing how the medicines were administered (pills, tablets, injections, pessaries, etc.). Authors can avoid their frequent anachronisms by reading when most of our present-day remedies first became available and how they developed.
A surprising omission is almost any mention of malaria and quinine, presumably because we no longer have malaria in the West, although it was common in Kent until the 17th century. The ‘we’ of the title is an ethnocentric ‘we’.
