The Healing Arts
From trepanation to CRISPR, the long fight against pain, plague, and death, told through the people and discoveries that actually moved the needle. This wing is the most universal subject in the whole Athenaeum: everybody eventually needs it.
The Fabrica: When Anatomy Became Art
In June 1543 a Basel printer finished seven books of human anatomy whose woodcuts people still argue about. What mattered was not that the book was beautiful: Vesalius had cut the bodies himself, printed what he found, and put the pictures where a stranger in another country could hold them up against a corpse and disagree. He was also a Galenist who printed one of Galen's errors on purpose, and who went on annotating his own copy for years afterwards, mostly for the Latin rather than the anatomy.
CRISPR: Rewriting the Human Blueprint
A bacterial immune system, reprogrammed in 2012 and given a Nobel Prize in 2020, is now an approved medicine: Casgevy, the first CRISPR therapy cleared anywhere, whose pivotal trial saw 29 of 29 evaluable sickle cell patients go a year or more without the crises that define their disease. It is also the tool one researcher aimed at human embryos in 2018, and went to prison for. CRISPR's medical and ethical record, tier by tier, including four claims refused by name.
The Great Dying: A History of Pandemics
Three plague pandemics, an influenza that reached an estimated third of the living, and a map of one London street that founded epidemiology. The history of pandemics, with every death toll carrying its real range.
Papyrus and Poultice: Medicine in Egypt and Mesopotamia
Four thousand years ago, Egyptian and Mesopotamian healers were already doing something recognizably like medicine: examining, diagnosing, giving a prognosis, and writing it down. The papyri and the tablets show real empirical practice and genuinely active drugs standing beside incantation and ritual, for millennia, with no seam between them.
The Psychedelic Renaissance: What the Trials Actually Show
Research stopped in 1970 and restarted in 2000. Psilocybin now has two large positive Phase 3 trials, MDMA-assisted therapy had its application rejected in August 2024, and esketamine remains the only approved compound anywhere near this class. What the evidence supports, and what it refuses.
Trepanation: The Oldest Surgery
Thousands of years before writing, before metal tools or anesthesia, humans were cutting holes in the skulls of living people. The astonishing part is not that they did it, but that patients survived: healed bone around the openings proves it, across nearly every ancient culture. In late pre-Columbian Peru, survival may have topped ninety percent, better than Civil War cranial surgery. Humanity's oldest operation, what the evidence shows, why they did it, and why the wonder needs no ancient aliens.