The best books about medical breakthroughs

Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria.

At the Guardian, he tagged some of his favorite books about medical breakthroughs, including:

Few breakthroughs can be more important than James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins’s Nobel prize-winning discovery of the helical structure of DNA – a story told in Watson’s hugely popular but partial 1968 memoir The Double Helix. As Brenda Maddox explains in Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, it was Franklin’s photograph of the molecule, shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge, that confirmed their intuition. Feminist scholars have sought to portray Franklin, who died in 1958 and who was overlooked for the 1962 Nobel prize, as the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”. However, in her remarkable book based on Franklin’s personal correspondence, Maddox shows Franklin maintained a close friendship with Watson and Crick until her death.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue