It has already been widely observed that in recent weeks quite a lot of people have apparently become, virtually overnight and minus any relevant degree course, epidemiologists or virologists or other experts in infectious diseases. However, should you happen to be one of those seemingly rare souls who still feels shamefully ignorant when it comes to such matters – I am certainly one such person – then I have good news in the form of Medicine: A Graphic History. A collaboration between Dr Jean-Noël Fabiani, the head of cardiac surgery at George Pompidou European hospital in Paris, and Philippe Bercovici, the cartoonist best known for his series The Women in White, this utterly brilliant comic will feed you vital and amazing information so painlessly you’ll barely realise how much you’re learning.
As Fabiani writes in his introduction, the history of medicine is deeply serious; so much is at stake. But it’s also “embroidered with a rich seam of anecdote” – a series of scenes “from the familiar human comedy, where scholars and social climbers, charlatans and saints, amateurs and professionals merrily rub shoulders”. What this means in practice is that while he takes in such topics as the development of surgery and the discovery of circulation of blood, the fight against infection and the search for effective contraception, he’s still more than happy to poke fun at the misconceptions both of the historical past and of the individuals who populated it (the latter often hampered by a blindness born of pomposity, competitiveness and, sometimes, religious faith). In this, Bercovici, whose drawings are reminiscent of those of the late Albert Uderzo, the illustrator of Asterix, is his perfect ally. The characters in his strips wear such hilarious expressions – even, or perhaps especially, when they’ve got the pox – that they function as medicine themselves, a tincture that’s all but guaranteed to make the reader laugh out loud.
Ah, yes: the pox. Naturally, I turned first to the chapter about the great epidemics, in which, in the course of just 18 pages, Fabiani and Bercovici tell the stories of the search for cures for smallpox, plague, cholera and syphilis. Even if you already know about, say, Edward Jenner and Robert Koch (I dimly remembered Koch’s name from school), it’s the details that capture the imagination – here, as elsewhere. The fact that it was the Persian physician Rhazes, who in the ninth century distinguished smallpox from the measles; that Napoleon vaccinated not only his army against smallpox, but also his baby son; that the intravenous catheter was invented in 1832 by an Edinburgh surgeon, Thomas Latta, who tried to rehydrate a cholera patient using a goose quill; that Baldwin IV, the Crusader king of Jerusalem, died of leprosy at the age of 24 (though his illness did not prevent him from first checking the ambitions of Saladin). And on and on. Truly, this book, witty and wise, is nothing less than a tonic. As we await a vaccine for Covid-19, its every page serves to remind us that where there is curiosity, determination and learning, there is always, always hope.
• Medicine: A Graphic History by Jean-Noël Fabiani and Philippe Bercovici is published by SelfMadeHero (£15.99)
