Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and our Difficulty Swallowing It

Druin Burch’s controversial argument is that, for most of human history, medicine has been a catastrophe. Over the last two thousand years doctors have killed patients far more often than they saved them, and patients have colluded because they trusted them. This book is about how little and how much has changed. It is about the medical drugs of modern Europe and America, and ways we have learnt to understand them.

For years patients have placed their trust in doctors and the drugs they prescribe. Yet as Druin Burch’s thought-provoking history of medicine demonstrates our trust has often been misplaced. Only with the development of antibiotics after the Second World War did doctors begin to cure more than they killed but even in this supposedly advanced age patients feel victim to tragedies such as the Thalidomide scandal. Burch argues that the real heroes of medicine are the men and women who demonstrated the vital importance of controlled testing over the ‘intuition’ of doctors and encourages us to ask more questions about the new breed of wonder drugs, to question our own doctors and to press governments against handing control of our medicines, and our lives, to global drug companies. His book is both alarming and optimistic, and is essential reading.