Networks of Ideas

Steven Johnson’s book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, and its companion PBS and BBC series, examined the largely unplanned roles played in our lives by: Glass—”A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress.” Cold—”Our mastery of cold is helping to reorganize settlement patterns all

The Invention of Surgery

For 1,500 years, medical practice in the Western and Arab worlds, such as it was, was dominated by the doctrines of two ancient Greeks: Hippocrates and Galen, who explained the inner workings of the body with the theory of the four humors. But in his book, The Invention of Surgery: A History of Modern Medicine: