Greek medicine dismissed supernatural powers, though not macrocosmic, environmental influences; and from the Renaissance the flourishing anatomical and physiological programmes created a new confidence among investigators that everything that needed to be known could essentially be discovered by probing more deeply and ever more minutely into the

Disease is a social development no less than the medicine that combats it.

(1738–1814), whose praise of its humanity (it was fast and foolproof) illustrates the Revolution’s chilling blend of idealism and inhumanity.

such operations were left to

The god would either perform the cure himself, or would give the patient a dream to be deciphered by the priest.

To cure night-blindness fried ox liver was to be taken – possibly a tried-and-tested procedure, as liver is rich in vitamin

Rotting food and faeces clogging the system were considered perilous, hence the need to prevent pus formation and to cleanse the innards with laxatives.

Thus to many, from classical poets up to the prophets of modernity, disease has seemed the dark side of development, its Jekyll-and-Hyde double: progress brings pestilences, society sickness.

The guillotine, that high-tech tool of the Jacobin Terror, was ironically the invention of a progressive Paris physician, Dr Joseph Guillotin