The journey of medicine
The effort to understand and cure disease, on a road from books to experiment, from microbes to the genome.
This page delivers no verdict; it presents claims and evidence with their sources. No theory in science is absolute.
Stop 1c. 1025MedicineText / work
Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine
Avicenna's Canon brought the medical knowledge of its time into a systematic whole and was read as a textbook for centuries.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 21628MedicineText / work
The circulation of the blood
Harvey argued from measurement and calculation that blood circulates in a continuous loop.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 31798MedicineEvent / publication / experiment
Vaccination
From Ottoman variolation to Jenner's cowpox vaccine, it was shown that immunity could be acquired deliberately.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 41876MedicineIdea / theory / claim
Germ theory of disease
With the work of Semmelweis, Snow, Pasteur and Koch, the view that many diseases spread through microbes gained ground.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 51929MedicineEvent / publication / experiment
Penicillin and antibiotics
The mould Fleming noticed opened the age of antibiotics; resistance is part of the same age.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 6April 1953BiologyEvent / publication / experiment
The double-helix structure of DNA
The double helix of DNA offered a model of how heredity is copied.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 7December 2020MedicineTechnology / invention
mRNA vaccines
mRNA vaccines prepare immunity by handing cells the recipe for a protein; they were used at scale from 2020.
Claims, evidence and sources →Stop 8May 2025MedicineEvent / publication / experiment
Personalised in vivo gene-editing therapy
In 2025 a gene-editing therapy designed for a single patient's mutation was given; its long-term results are not yet known.
Claims, evidence and sources →
Other journeys
- The story of the atom · 7 stops
- From the night sky to the beginning of the universe · 11 stops
- From counting to artificial intelligence · 11 stops
- Reason and revelation: a debate in Islamic thought · 9 stops
- Views on the origin of living things · 11 stops
- From brain to mind · 9 stops