‘Historians have a short shelf life’, writes Charles Rosenberg in the enlightening concluding essay to this new edition of Erwin Ackerknecht's A Short History of Medicine. ‘[O]nly a small minority are still in print two generations after their first publications – and even those who are (or have been) influential … are still read only in graduate seminars … Erwin H. Ackerknecht probably falls into this category’ (p. 193). This was certainly the first place I encountered Ackerknecht's work. However, with their revised and expanded version of A Short History, Johns Hopkins University Press are providing a new generation of scholars fresh light in which to read this enjoyable work, and a new opportunity to become acquainted with an important figure in the development of their field.

In this compact, highly readable volume, Ackerknecht guides the reader from Palaeolithic man (and animal) to the twentieth century in twenty brief chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 tackle palaeopathology and palaeomedicine, and offer a comparative and functionalist reading of ethnomedicine. Chapters 3 to 7 review the character and development of medicine in ancient societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Central and South America (Chapter 3); India and China (Chapter 4); and Greece (Chapters 5, 6 and – along with Rome and Alexandria – 7). The next two chapters consider medieval and Renaissance medicine, before the chronological scope narrows to consider medicine in the seventeenth (Chapter 10) and eighteenth (Chapter 11) centuries.

Chapters 12 to 19 all focus on developments between 1800 and 1900, reflecting the author's belief that ‘some of the most prominent and “modern” traits of present-day medicine actually were already well in evidence in the nineteenth century’ (p. 181). These chapters consider the transformation of clinical medicine through large-scale examination and autopsy in the first half of the 1800s (Chapter 12); advances in the basic sciences (microscopic anatomy, physiology, pathology and pharmacy – Chapter 13); the emergence of the ‘laboratory medicine’ of the ‘present day’ (Chapter 14); the development of microbiology (Chapter 15), surgery and gynaecology (Chapter 16); specialization and specialisms (Chapter 17); and public health (Chapter 18); before ending with a review of medicine in the United States before 1900 (Chapter 19). Ackerknecht's material closes with an epilogue considering trends in twentieth-century medicine (Chapter 20). However, particularly helpful for the new volume are the bookending contributions of Charles Rosenberg, who provides a foreword to the work, and a concluding essay on Ackerknecht and his contributions to the history of medicine. Similarly, Lisa Haushofer provides an excellent bibliographic essay, helpfully updating readers on work that continues some of Ackerknecht's interests, and on new approaches taken since the last issue of the Short History, published some thirty-four years ago.

As might be expected, the passage of time means that the text has some problems. The content of the book has not been reworked significantly to account for the radical changes and significant findings in the field over the past three decades. Underpinning Ackerknecht's analysis, for instance, is a form of Western exceptionalism often prevalent in earlier scholarship, and parts of the work tell a teleological march towards rationality and the progressive accumulation of knowledge within ‘Western’ medicine. As a result, discussions of colonialism and colonial exchange are missing. Moreover, while the medical systems of – for example – India and China are considered contextually (and favourably, in contrast to contemporaneous European equivalents), Ackerknecht nonetheless compares ‘Greek science’ and ‘Oriental mysticism’ (p. 52), and describes ‘non-Western’ traditions as ‘static’ (p. 27) in the millennia after 1000 BCE – he also does not discuss them any further in the volume. Likewise, Ackerknecht censures a thousand years of late antiquity and ‘medieval medicine’ as equally unprogressive – ‘corrupted’ by ‘supernaturalism’ and ‘magic’ (p. 63) – while paying more attention (especially in his nineteenth-century chapters) to the modern contributions of notable clinicians and scientists than to the quotidian work of popular practitioners, or to the histories of later-redundant categories or beliefs.

Of course, it is hardly fair to criticize an older work for failing to predict future directions in the field. And indeed, the Short History of Medicine has much to recommend it beyond its prose and brevity. As Rosenberg notes in his foreword, Ackerknecht's contextualism is still an important reminder to many of us in the field. However short a chapter might be, Ackerknecht seeks to explain beliefs, practices and disease distributions within social, economic, cultural and intellectual contexts. ‘Social change influences pathology as well as medicine’ (p. 14), Ackerknecht suggests at one point, connecting endemic and epidemic acute infections to densely settled populations. Similarly, specialization is linked not just to new technologies and the growth of knowledge, but also to intensified urbanization (providing sufficient patient material), to popular responses toward – and demand for – specialists, and to cultural values attached to specific conditions and populations, such as Enlightenment interest in child health in the case of paediatrics. Equally, readers are warned about assuming that present-day knowledge will remain the truth of the future (p. xxii), and even the chapter on microbiology contains criticism of the ways in which contemporaries’ ‘blind faith’ obscured the role played by a range of factors outside the interactions of bacteria and host (p. 146). This was despite Ackerknecht believing the rise of bacteriology to be the most important medical development ‘perhaps of all time’ (p. 147).

In fact, given that the work is most likely to be read by students and academics interested in historiography – as much as in empirical studies of the history of medicine – the dating of the volume is of no negative consequence. Supposed weaknesses of the volume can be seen as strengths. Thus Ackerknecht's oversight of imperialism, his discussion of ‘stages’ of development, or the way his relativism and contextualism relate to his Western exceptionalism, become objects of interest in themselves. Both as an account of the past and as an object of study, then, A Short History of Medicine is a book with which it is well worth engaging.