The Cure

For roughly the entire span of human existence, medicine did more harm than good. Physicians bled and purged their patients and explained it all with a theory of four bodily fluids that was elegant, confident, and almost entirely wrong. Half of all children died before they grew up. And then, in the space of a single long lifetime, nearly all of it changed.

The Cure tells that astonishing story whole — in vivid, cinematic scenes and plain, patient explanation. Here is the Stone Age surgeon drilling a living skull; Vesalius stealing bodies from the gallows to correct a thousand years of error; the enslaved African Onesimus teaching Boston how to fight smallpox; Jenner and his milkmaids; Semmelweis, ruined for telling doctors to wash their hands; Pasteur racing a rabid dog's poison through the veins of a frightened boy; Fleming's lucky mold; Salk and the largest medical experiment in history; and a Hungarian scientist named Katalin Karikó, ignored for decades, whose stubborn work on a fragile molecule ended up in billions of arms during a pandemic.

Warm, surprising, and gloriously readable, this is the one book for anyone who has ever wondered how we stopped dying of everything — and how the humble vaccine, the greatest lifesaver ever devised, drove a disease from the face of the earth for the first time in history.