Good look at history of medicine

I enjoyed this book. The book makes the history of medicine come alive through the use of vignettes, obituaries, press clippings, and art/photos. I also appreciated the author’s use of family anecdotes. I can see why the book is identified as a guide for family historians, as the book provides a lot of resources for exploring family history, although these apply only to Britain. Indeed, a lot of the material is specific to Britain but there is enough general medical information to be of interest to anyone interested in the history of medicine, of which there is much in the book. One thing I particularly liked was the definition of historical medical terms with more modern names. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of medicine. Thank you to Netgalley and Pen & Sword for the advance reader copy.

How Our Ancestors Died: A Guide for Family Historians is a very well written, information dense, layman accessible tome aimed at genealogists and family historians presented by Dr. Simon Wills. Originally published in 2013, this reformat and re-release is due out 28th Feb 2021 from Pen & Sword. It's 240 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

I'm a medical professional and I work in pathology. The study of disease is literally my day job. I also happen to be a huge history nerd and my family hail from the British Isles, so this book was a happy confluence of interests for me. I learned quite a lot here and it's no stretch to imagine that the author is a gifted speaker/teacher. His style throughout the book is information rich but not pedantic and he has a rare gift of highlighting salient points without just drowning the reader in less useful information or getting bogged down in minutiae.

The introductory chapters give good background information on the often lacking scientific accuracy of medical care and diagnostics in centuries past. In these chapters the author provides good background info on the normal historical methods of recording information and where and how modern seekers can access the information (and what records are likely to be available and from whom).

The following chapters are arranged by cause of death, roughly alphabetically, and range from Accidents & Disasters to War & Wounds, with pretty much everything else one could imagine in between. The chapters are well supported with attributed quotes (for further reading) and photographs and facsimile documents scattered throughout. The author has also included a short bibliography and cross-referenced index.

This will be a valuable resource for family researchers, readers of history, public & home library acquisition, as well as writers of historical fiction/non-fiction. It's layman accessible and interesting. I read it through cover to cover like a novel.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Fascinating and somewhat entertaining look at what our ancestors' died from. Loved the chapter on smoking and cancer. Makes me laugh to this day that doctors and nurses would smoke when visiting patients. Allergists and ENT's also smoked with visiting patients. To think smoking was considered healthful until about the 1960's! I enjoyed the chapter on alcoholism, too. Now I always knew a beer was an everyday drink for everyone, just not how low an alcohol content it had. That was interesting. I was also surprised to learn most alcoholic beverages were rather low in alcohol until distilleries were created. Who knew? Pregnancy and childbirth were always dreaded by women- babies could kill you. And off course there are all the illnesses, diseases and accident waiting around every corner. In light of the current pandemic, it sort of puts things in perspective I think. Fun and informative book.