The influence of Greek medical practices dating back to the fifth century B.C. has had an immeasurable impact on the development of medicine in the West over the subsequent centuries. This text is designed to cover the history of Western medicine from Classical Antiquity to 1800. As one guiding thread it takes the system of medical ideas that, in large part, went back to the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and played a major role in the understanding and treatment of health and disease. The influence of Greek medicine spread from the Aegean basin to the rest of the Mediterranean region, to Europe, and then to European settlements overseas. By the nineteenth century, however, this tradition no longer carried the same force or occupied so central a position within medicine. This book charts the influence of this tradition through twenty centuries, examining it in its social and historical context. It is essential reading as a new synthesis for all students of the history of medicine.

‘In England any person fond of natural history enjoys a great advantage … but in these fertile climates, teeming with life, the attractions are so numerous, that he is scarcely able to walk at all’

When the Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27th December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. The journal that he kept shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology and natural history as well as people, places and events.  Volcanoes in the Galapagos, the Gossamer spider of Patagonia, the Australasian coral reefs and the brilliance of the firefly; all are to be found in these extraordinary writings. The insights made on the five-year voyage were to set in motion the intellectual currents that lead to the most controversial book of the Victorian age: The Origin of Species.

This volume reprints Charles Darwin’s journal in a shortened form. It contains an introduction providing a background to Darwin’s thought and work, as well as notes, maps and appendices and an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s friend and captain of the Beagle.

‘I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back on my own life …’

Self-taught and ambitious, Darwin genuinely believed he was ‘below the common standard in intellect’ and had gained little from formal education. Yet he also knew he had seized his one great stroke of luck – the voyage of the Beagle – and forged a lasting body of knowledge through solitary determination and sheer hard work. His memoir concentrates on his public career and towering scientific achievements, but is also full of lively anecdotes about his family and contemporaries. Among these, he paints a vivid portrait of his bullying father, and pays a loving tribute to his devoted wife Emma, who was so distressed by their religious differences. The figure that emerges from these pages is one who stands isolated, dogged by illness and confined to solitude by his ailing body, with a mind that rejected the arts and the ‘damnable doctrine’ of Christianity.

This volume also includes a fascinating fragment about Darwin’s earliest memories, which he jotted down while pondering the impact of evolution on human psychology.