This pretty much delivered what I expected—a light, entertaining, fast read, a lot of historical medical trivia, a few jokes, a fun read if you like the darker, weirder, grosser parts of the past. There are lots of bite-sized chunks of info loosely grouped around topic like “internal medicine” and “quack doctors”, with scattered illustrations drawn from medical texts (mostly of medical instruments and doctors at work). He brings up stuff like alchemy and sympathetic healing, shows somewhat the progression of things like medical licensing, even brings up some noteworthy figures (if you’re into this stuff) like Robert Liston and Mary Toft.

However, if you’re looking for a book aimed at serious history people or academics, this isn’t it. Cawthorne might have done a lot of research to come up with all the medieval and early modern texts, and all the folk healing and medical pamphlets, and everything else that he’s drawing from—but in most cases, he doesn’t cite his sources. Did he get that fact from a newspaper? An old book? Someone else’s modern academic collection of medical history? Where would I read that ad, if I wanted to look for it?

In a similar vein, he often bounces around in history, putting a medieval cure after one from the 1600s and following it with something that’s probably from the 1700s but he doesn’t say. And I would have appreciated having more explanations of whether a given cure might have worked, what active ingredients there were, that sort of thing. More context, basically, not just lists of ingredients or advertisement. I like knowing why.

But like I said, I didn’t really go in expecting that, it would’ve just been icing on the cake. There’s a lot of information, told understandably, and Cawthorne’s method of mainly quoting text and relating incidents helps to convey patterns in a way that simply explaining them wouldn’t—common ingredients, common types of treatments, even the way people wrote addresses before maps and mass literacy. He’s made the history engaging too, or at least brought it to life somewhat as a “weird medicine highlights reel”—and it’s certainly made me relieved to be living now, when I don’t have to worry about dying from arsenic pills.

It was enjoyable, I learned a bit, I didn’t get all the jokes on account of not being British, and I think there might even be some facts that I can put into use in fiction at some point. Would recommend, even though it wasn’t quite as good as it could have been.

To bear in mind: May contain medical treatments and ailments not suitable for all viewers (but not that many).

6.8/10 ( )