Codex Chronica
Thirty-six plates in the history of medicine, arranged as a living atlas of bodies, instruments, contagions and cures.
Contagion & Quarantine
An early intuition that some sicknesses pass from hand to hand.
Read →Hippocratic Greece
Disease unyoked from the will of the gods.
Imperial Rome
Galen anatomises the ape, and rules for ages.
The Golden Age of Islam
Avicenna codifies the whole of medicine.
The Anatomical Renaissance
Vesalius corrects the ancients from the corpse itself.
The Age of Circulation
Harvey sets the blood upon its circle.
The First Inoculation
Jenner borrows a shield from the cowpox.
The Listening Physician
Laennec rolls the first stethoscope of paper.
The Conquest of Pain
Ether silences the surgeon's knife.
A Day at the Ether Dome
“Gentlemen, this is no humbug” — the operation without the scream.
Read →
Chloroform & the Queen
The royal childbed lends respectability to the sweeter, more dangerous vapour.
Read →
The End of Heroic Speed
Anaesthesia ends the race against pain, and opens the dangerous interval before antisepsis.
Read →The Mapping of Contagion
Snow lifts the handle from the pump.
The Germ Theory
Pasteur banishes life born of nothing.
The Reign of Antisepsis
Lister wages open war on putrefaction.
The Hunters of Microbes
Koch gives the consumption a face.
The Invisible Light
Röntgen photographs the living bone.
The Sweetness Restored
Banting tames the sugar sickness.
The Mould that Saved Millions
Fleming sees the clear ring; Oxford makes it a medicine.
The Double Helix
The cipher of heredity is unwound.
The Borrowed Heart
Barnard dares the impossible.
