From time to time we look at books dealing with the history of medicine, past examples including Dying for Victorian Medicine and Hidden Treasure. This time our featured title is The Art of Medicine, “…a unique gallery of rarely seen paintings, artifacts, drawings, prints, and extracts from manuscripts” – harvested from the Wellcome Collection in London, and edited by medical historian Julie Anderson and science writers Emm Barnes and Emma Shackleton.

Covering lands from Persia to China, cultures from prehistoric Mesoamerica to Renaissance Europe, as well as more recent examples from World War I and 2008’s “The Daily Stream of Consciousness” (by Bobby Baker, an artist chronicling her own struggle with mental illness), The Art of Medicine offers a fascinating visual record of humans and health throughout history.

You can sample more examples of AoM’s contents at this Brainpickings blog post, while the book itself is available both in our on-campus and virtual bookstore locations.