East Asia and the Law of the Sea Book

Also available on the WondrousBooks blog.

I found this book in the most random way possible - I was visiting the apartment of a colleague of mine and, of course, browsing through her bookshelf, when I saw this title. Being a fan of everything creepy, weird and morbid, I asked her about the book and she told me that it was left in the apartment by the previous tenant. Quite the book to abandon, huh?

In all honesty, Blood and Guts is not the most bloody book out there. In fact, it's very far from it. The title was rather misleading, but the book was overall enjoyable, aside from that.

If it so happens that you are curious about medicine and its history, but you're not actually into the topic - at least not enough "into it" to buy a more detailed and comprehensive history book, Blood and Guts is the right one for you.

This rather short illustrated history of medicine tells its reader about certain aspects of the medicine we know today and their historical development. You can learn about the spread of viral diseases that we've all heard about, such as the plague, the Spanish flu and so on, as well as the development of cures for them; the creation of the first hospitals; the first autopsies, etc. In case you want to get deeply into the topic, this book will not get you far, be warned.

I quite enjoyed the first part of the book which was going through different diseases and how they spread around the world, as well as the first discoveries in medicine. I started losing interest as we came nearer to our own time and the reason for that is that, I believe, a lot more was happening as time went on, so the book could not successfully encapsulate it and a large part of the end of the book somehow lacked substance. It does sometimes happen when you try to fit as much information as possible in a limited space - things get very vague and loose their meaning (as I remember from my own university papers).

Nevertheless, the book was quite enjoyable for the overview that it provided on an otherwise rather huge subject. I do recommend it to those of you who are curious to know, but not into the topic enough to, for example, start an actual study on the history of medicine.