The medicine cabinet The story of health and disease told through extraordinary objects

Book - 2019

A compendium of over 100 objects related to the story of medicine. Each object is cared for by London's Science Museum, which houses one of the largest collections of medical artefacts in the world - including a Bronze Age trepanned skull, healing water from an Ancient Greek well, a seventeenth-century barber's pole, a pharmacist's ceramic leech jar, a gold memento mori ring, First World War blood transfusion apparatus and a prototype MRI scanner. The objects are profound reminders of the fragility of human existence, but also of the extraordinary lengths gone to by scientists, medical professionals and ordinary people in the attempt to conquer mortality. Published in association with the Science Museum, The Medicine Cabinet ...is an exploration of life, death and everything in between. more