Science and Technology in Medicine
- Andras Gedeon
Science and Technology in Medicine by Andras Gedeon (Springer, €74.95) is an extensively illustrated selection of key works that introduced science and technology into medicine.
It begins at a time when medicine in Europe was mostly folklore and mysticism, with Albrecht Dürer's treatise in 1528 on human proportions, and closes with Michael Phelps' 1975 landmark paper on PET scanning.
A summary of each of 99 publications — the 100th is left to the imagination of the reader — is accompanied by a brief description of its author. The significance of the discovery and its influence on later medical developments are explained.
The illustration shown here is from the works of Giovanni Borelli and was published posthumously in his two-volume De motu animalium (On the Movement of Animals) in 1680–81. Borelli adapted Galileo's science of mechanics to physiology, but realized that biomechanics alone could not account for muscle contraction: chemical reactions within the muscle must be involved.
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From mysticism to medicine. Nature 442, 871 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/442871a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/442871a
