Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine is just how very, very modern it is. Ninety percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950. Just two centuries ago medicine was an art, not a science at all, and people—whistling past the graveyard—joked that the difference between English doctors and French ones was that French doctors killed you while English ones let you die. Even sixty years ago there was usually little the medical profession could do once disease set in except alleviate some of the symptoms and let nature take its course.

When the distinguished physician and author Lewis Thomas was a young boy, in the 1920s, he often accompanied his physician father on house calls, and his father would talk with him about the patients he was seeing and the medicine he was practicing.

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