The fracture of the left humerus that Livingstone sustained during the famous attack by a lion at Mabotsa in 1843 was still not united when a postmortem examination was performed on his pickled body after its return to England in April 1874. C S Nicholls’ pocket biography, David Livingstone (Sutton Publishing, £4.99, ISBN 0 7509 1591 9), is full of such intriguing facts. But I wanted to know more about his inner journeys. Questions about what drove Livingstone to undertake his vast African explorations remain unanswered.
Most doctors’ hearts sink when a patient tells them—and it’s always the patient who makes the diagnosis—that they have ME. Read Chronic Fatigue and its Syndromes (Oxford University Press, £65, ISBN 0 19 262181 5) to understand why. Wessely and colleagues start with some simple thought experiments to illustrate the various meanings attached to the word fatigue. They discuss, in an appropriately exhaustive manner, the history, epidemiology, and mechanisms of fatigue and the social context in which disorders such as neurasthenia, myalgic encephalomyelitis, and chronic fatigue syndrome occur.
The invention of printing in the second half of the 15th century spelt the death of the medieval illuminated manuscript. But a glance at the beautifully produced Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (British Library, £20, ISBN 07123 0657 9) shows how the conventions of medical illustration sometimes survive changing technology. A stylised depiction of the anatomy of the tunics and humours of the eye in a late 14th century miniature looks decidedly modern. On the other hand, the indicators of prognosis used by the ancients seem exotic. Among them was the Caladrius, a mythical white bird which attended the sickbed of royalty and foretold death or recovery by looking at, or away from, the patient.
Textbooks of epidemiology tend to focus on methods and, as a result, often fail to capture the excitement of the subject. Stolley and Lasky take a different approach in Investigating Disease Patterns—The Science of Epidemiology (Scientific American Library, £15.95, ISBN 0 7167 6024 X). In the preface they make the bold claim that most of what is currently known about both the cause and prevention of human disease is a result of the work of epidemiologists. The book doesn’t tell you how to do a case-control study, but its account of epidemiological investigations of disease from the 17th century onwards goes a long way to justifying the authors’ introductory statement.Christopher Martyn, BMJ