David Wootton

Why has medicine been so slow to improve over the centuries?

Jim Downs sees war and colonialism as contributing to our understanding of epidemics. But many Hippocratic therapies continued unchanged into the 20th century

Florence Nightingale was eventually forced to accept the existence of the cholera bacillus, though she continued to misunderstand it. Credit: Alamy
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  • Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Transformed Medicine

    Jim Downs

    Belknap, pp. 320, £23

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