Very interesting read. PBS has done like a special with some of the topics in here but it definitely would make a good PBS special or documentary.

This is solid popular science, recounting the horrific world of "heroic" and largely ineffective medicine before the late 19th century, and the development of germ theory, carbolic acid as a disinfectant (Listerine!), the great national labs like the Pasteur Institute, the dye industry and sulfa drugs, penicillin, the wrenching decisions about who got this new "miracle cure" during WWII's limited supply, the rapidly changing role of doctors as miracle workers with magic bullets in the 1950s, the beginnings of superbugs resistant to antibiotics and the state of the world today.