Medical history books

> it’s still not all that clear if letting a doctor treat you is a better idea than staying home, eating right, exercising and minding your own business.

This is a pleasant fantasy people indulge in, but it is a fantasy: It's the notion that disease, by which I mean serious disease, only happens to people who "deserve it" in some sense, whether by dissipated and profligate lifestyle or having the poor sense to live in a clearly disreputable and dirty neighborhood. That might work in some cases, as when a smoker gets lung cancer, but there are plenty of diseases where the cause is quite beyond anyone's control and, possibly, not known at all. The obvious example is all genetic disorders, such as Type 1 Diabetes, which is invariably fatal untreated but can be managed very successfully with medical help, but there are also cancers of unknown origin, such as the one I had which is now in complete remission due to quite a lot of medical intervention, including CAR T-cell therapy.

So the author of the review has an ignorant, moralistic view of health, one which the books they've read have failed to shift. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

I really enjoyed “The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.”

About early surgery and the discovery and adoption of anti-septics.

The Alarming History of Medicine: Amusing Anecdotes from Hippocrates to Heart Transplants - Richard Gordon (1997) is amusingly light-hearted. The author is more famous for medical fiction.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010) is very interesting.

Interesting topic aside:

What does the author mean by "sexual sublimation"? I can't be sure from context and google says 'sublimation' means phase change, but the referenced usage is 'before antibiotics' which would appear to be a constant state or phase prior to the change antibiotics would bring. Is my vocabulary lacking or is the author just doing a bit of word salad here?