One of my colleagues lended me this book. He told me this reading might inform me when I have to prepare Theory of Knowledge (TOK) lessons as Natural Science is one optional theme of this subject.
I didn't start to read this book until I had finished another book on Mathematics curriculum and teaching--a Mathematician's lament, which was also borrowed from one of my colleagues. Interestingly, she is also interested in TOK and believed that reading the book would be helpful when dealing with Mathematics part in the TOK.
While the math book is quite opinionated, this science book is objective. Reading the math book made me feel excited, inspired, and even sometimes bewildered because of the author's extremely progressive views. Reading the book of A little history of science is a pleasant experience to me.
A little history of science consists of 40 chapters. Each chapter tells one story about scientific development over past some 5000 years. The book is not organized by disciplines although it does contains a variety of subject areas, including Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Astronomy, and Geology. Instead, the author seems to organize the contents in a chronological order. This approach makes sense because it was how our ancestors had explore the planet, the universe, the physical world, and ourselves. No investigation in the real world could be neatly confined to a single discipline!
On the pages in the book, I came to meet quite a few familiar figures that I either read about or heard about before. For example, the chapter titled 'The Master of those who know' introduced the thoughts of Aristotle and how this great man tried to make sense of the world around him. I read about many stories about Einstein and his contribution to theoretical Physics before. The chapter "The game changer: Einstein" still provided me with a good summary of Einstein's achievements as well as his contribution to and resistance with the development of quantum Physics.
I also got to know several great people that I heard little of. For instance, "The father of Medicine: Hippocrates". I knew every doctor would be asked to take the Hippocratic Oath when he or she graduated from a medicine school. However, I didn't know details about Hippocrates' (and his followers') contributions. In this chapter, I learned the three principles that guided medical science for centuries in the western world. The first principle is that human's illness have natural causes and can seek rational explanations instead of supernatural causes. The second principle is that both health and diseases are caused by the 'humours' in human's bodies. The third principle concerns the 'healing power of nature', meaning the movements of humours in the body during diseases are "signs of the body's attempt to heal itself" (pp. 20-23).
In China, we have our own version of father of medicine, for example Shen Nong, and the three principles summarized above are not necessarily applied to the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. However, I sense that it is good to learn these principles as western medicine actually dominates the medical field even within China.
Another rather interesting chapter is about "Coughs, Sneezes and Diseases". The book was first published in 2013, which is long before the ongoing corona virus pandemic that began in 2020. Reading this chapter made me feel that we are actually living in the history of our human's battle with virus. I think every one living in today should remember the name of an English country doctor, Edward Jenner (1949-1823), who invented the procedure of "vaccination" when he deliberately injected a milder disease cowpox into a boy in order to cure his more dangerous smallpox. It is this genius innovation that makes our today's prevention of corona virus possible and that makes normal lives of hundreds and thousands people possible.
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