Medical London
City of Diseases, City of Cures

Written by Richard Barnett
Edited by Mike Jay

Published by Strange Attractor Press
In association with Wellcome Collection

ISBN: 978-0-9558761-0-3
Publication: 10 November 2008

For two thousand years, health and sickness have danced across, above and below the city’s streets, defining London life in the process. MEDICAL LONDON charts the many roles that diseases, treatments and cures have played in the city’s sprawling story, and reveals how London, in turn, has shaped the professions and practices of modern medicine. In doing so, it guides its readers on their own journey through the city’s streets and landmarks, and resurrects the vanished traces of its past.

Presented in a cloth slipcase, Medical London comprises three distinct, interlocking elements:

Sick City
A volume of essays exploring some of the threads that medicine has woven through London life, from its earliest beginnings to the multicultural metropolis of today: its roles in contagion and sanitation, in wealth and its consumption, in empire and immigration, in pleasure and in madness.

Anatomy of the City
A definitive guide to London’s medical landscape: its museums and hospitals, its grand monuments and secret corners, and the characters, stories and events that lie behind them.

Six maps for self-guided walks: from Daniel Defoe’s Plague Year wanderings to the druggists of Soho’s night haunts, the homeopaths of bohemian Chelsea to the naval surgeons of maritime Greenwich.