Main description:

This is a fascinating collection of 150 articles from the New York Times archive. It charts the developing scientific insights, breakthroughs and struggles into diagnosing and treating a myriad of medical conditions. It also reveals medical mistakes, lapses in ethics, and wrong paths taken in hopes of curing disease. Today we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in history-a transformation due almost entirely to tremendous advances in medicine. This change is so profound, that it's hard now to imagine what the world was like in 1851, when the New York Times began publishing. Edited by award-winning writer Gina Kolata, this eye-opening collection of 150 articles from the New York Times archive charts the developing scientific insights and breakthroughs into diagnosing and treating conditions like typhoid, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and AIDS, and chronicles the struggles to treat mental illness and the enormous success of vaccines. It also reveals medical mistakes, lapses in ethics, and wrong paths taken in hopes of curing disease.