This text provides an account of the development of medical science in its various branches, and includes discussions of the medical profession and its institutions, and the impact of medicine upon populations, economic development, culture, religions, and thought.

v. 1. Art and science of medicine -- Place of medicine -- What is specific to Western medicine -- Historiography of medicine -- Medical care -- Body systems -- Anatomical tradition -- Microscopical tradition -- Physiological tradition -- Biochemical tradition -- Pathological tradition -- Immunological tradition -- Clinical research -- Theories of life, health and disease -- Concepts of health, illness and disease -- Ideas of life and death -- Humoralism -- Environment and miasmata -- Contagion/germ theory/specificity -- Nosology -- Ecology of disease -- Fevers --Constitutional and hereditary disorders -- Mental diseases -- Nutritional diseases -- Endocrine diseases -- Tropical diseases -- Cancer -- Sexually transmitted diseases -- Diseases of civilization -- Understanding disease -- Unorthodox medical theories -- Non-western concepts of disease -- Folk medicine -- Arab-Islamic medicine -- Chinese medicine -- Indian medicine -- v. 2. Clinical medicine -- History of the doctor-patient relationship -- Art of diagnosis: medicine and the five senses. (cont) Science of diagnosis: diagnostic technology -- History of medical ethics -- Women and medicine -- Drug therapies -- Physical methods -- Surgery (traditional) -- Surgery (modern) -- Psychotherapy --Childbirth -- Childhood -- Geriatrics -- Medicine in society -- History of the medical profession -- medical education -- Hospital -- Medical institutions and the state -- Public health -- Epidemiology -- History of personal hygiene -- General history of nursing: 1800-1900 -- Emergence of para-medical professions -- Psychiatry -- Health economics: finance, budgeting and insurance -- Medicine, ideas and culture -- Medicine and colonialism -- Internationalism in medicine and public health -- Medicine and anthropology -- Religion and medicine -- Charity before c.1850 --Medical philanthropy after 1850 -- Medicine and architecture -- Medicine and literature -- War and modern medicine -- Pain and suffering -- Medical technologies: social contexts and consequences -- Medicine and the law --Medical sociology -- Demography and medicine -- Medicine, mortality and morbidity.