Past healing

Coffee tables across the land will be trembling at the release of Medicine:
A History of Healing, edited by Roy Porter. But this heavyweight book will
reward you with a detailed and superbly illustrated history of medicine around
the world, which devotes as much space to alternative therapies as it does to
the conventional Western dictates of pills and scalpels. Published by Michael
O’Mara Books, £25, ISBN 185479289X.